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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons

arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Elastic Net Decoding for Information Retrieval

Dense retrieval has become the dominant paradigm in information retrieval, in which each document is scored against a query by the inner product of their vector embeddings, and the top-$k$ documents by score are retrieved for this query. However, since each document's score depends solely on the embedding of the query and itself, the retrieval process is oblivious to the content of the entire corpus. Therefore, dense retrieval cannot avoid selecting semantically similar documents from the corpus, which may result in a non-diverse, redundant set of retrieved documents. To this end, we approach retrieval as a joint decoding problem, in which documents are selected as a set with regard to the context of the rest of the corpus. To achieve this, we propose Non-Negative elastic Net (NNN) decoding, which selects documents whose embeddings jointly reconstruct the query embedding as a sparse non-negative linear combination. Our main theoretical result establishes a strict separation between dense retrieval and NNN decoding. For any corpus, every query correctly handled by dense retrieval is also handled by NNN decoding, while on corpora containing correlated documents, NNN decoding additionally handles queries that dense retrieval cannot. Experimental results indicate that applying NNN decoding to frozen embeddings trained for inner-product scoring yields consistent improvements across several benchmarks. Moreover, we introduce an end-to-end training procedure which optimizes the embeddings for NNN decoding, producing significant performance gains surpassing in all metrics and benchmarks compared to dense retrieval. Our work establishes a new paradigm for leveraging dense embeddings in information retrieval, beyond the standard practice of inner-product scoring.

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

Conditional Score-Based Modeling of Effective Langevin Dynamics

arXiv:2604.23952v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic reduced-order models are widely used to represent the effective dynamics of complex systems, but estimating their drift and diffusion coefficients from data remains challenging. Standard approaches often rely on short-time trajectory increments, state-space partitioning, or repeated simulation of candidate models, which become unreliable or computationally expensive for high-dimensional systems, coarse temporal sampling, or unevenly sampled data. We introduce a data-driven calibration method based on a novel relationship between the coefficients of a stochastic reduced model and the conditional score of the finite-time transition density, defined as the gradient of the logarithm of the transition density with respect to the initial state. The resulting identity expresses derivatives of lagged correlation functions as stationary expectations over observed lagged pairs involving this conditional score and the unknown model coefficients. This formulation allows the drift and diffusion structure to be constrained directly from finite-lag statistics, without differentiating trajectories, partitioning state space, or repeatedly integrating candidate reduced models during calibration, yielding a least-squares fitting problem over stationary lagged pairs. We validate the approach on three systems of increasing complexity: an analytically tractable Cox–Ingersoll–Ross diffusion, a two-dimensional nonequilibrium diffusion with affine multiplicative noise, and a periodic soft-spin stochastic Landau–Lifshitz chain. Across these tests, the inferred models preserve the invariant statistics while reproducing finite-lag dynamical correlations. The framework provides a scalable route for learning stochastic reduced-order models from data that reproduce prescribed statistical and dynamical properties.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Toward Human-Centered AI-Assisted Terminology Work

Generative AI is likely to transform terminology work by creating new opportunities for automation. At the same time, it raises concerns about the future of terminologists and terminological resources, as efficiency pressures may encourage excessive automation based on the perception that human expertise can be replaced by AI. However, large language models remain unreliable for terminological purposes due to errors, hallucinations, and various forms of bias, making terminologists indispensable for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of terminological data. This paper argues that human-centered AI, an approach that emphasizes that AI's primary goal should be to contribute to human well-being, provides a framework for maximizing the benefits of generative AI while mitigating its risks. It contends that high levels of automation and meaningful human control are compatible and desirable, and that AI should enhance terminologists' capabilities while preserving their agency and decision-making authority. The implications of AI-assisted terminology work are examined through three interrelated dimensions: the augmented terminologist, ethical AI, and human-centered design. In particular, the paper examines how AI integration reshapes the role of the terminologist, affects professional values and working conditions, requires the management of AI-generated bias, and calls for the design of AI tools around the terminologist's needs. The paper concludes that a human-centered orientation is necessary to ensure that AI strengthens, rather than undermines, the essential role of terminology work in supporting specialized communication and the accurate transmission of knowledge across languages and cultures.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Before You Think: System 0, AI-Mediated Cognition and Cognitive Colonization

arXiv:2606.13658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines three recent frameworks for understanding the cognitive and epistemic consequences of artificial intelligence: Tri-System Theory, Thinkframes, and System 0. It argues that while the first two capture important dimensions of AI's influence on individual reasoning and collective epistemic practices, System 0 occupies a theoretically distinctive position that neither can fully replicate. The paper introduces the concept of cognitive colonization, according to which AI systems can embed external interests within the architecture of the self in ways that are difficult for users to perceive. Because such systems are already widely deployed, understanding these invisible forms of influence is an urgent philosophical and practical task.

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

DemoDiffusion: One-Shot Human Imitation using pre-trained Diffusion Policy

arXiv:2506.20668v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks by imitating a single human demonstration, without requiring task-specific training or paired human-robot data. Our approach is based on two insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Unlike approaches based on online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, our method enables robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal effort. In real-world experiments across 8 diverse manipulation tasks, DemoDiffusion achieves 83.8\% average success rate, compared to 13.8\% for the pre-trained policy and 52.5\% for kinematic retargeting, succeeding even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Contrastive-Difference CKA Reveals Concept-Specific Structural Alignment Across Language Model Architectures

Authors:

Do different LLM architectures encode high-level concepts in structurally compatible ways? We systematically characterize a geometric-functional universality dissociation: across multiple concept domains and architectural families, moderate geometric convergence coexists with near-perfect functional transfer. Using contrastive-difference CKA (CKA_Delta), a training-free diagnostic that computes kernel alignment on per-sample contrastive differences, we isolate concept-specific convergence from generic similarity – achieving significant discrimination where standard CKA cannot. The dissociation replicates across all six concept domains we test (five with p =70B models. We position CKA_Delta as a practical regime classifier and architectural outlier detector (Gemma: d = 1.08, AUC = 0.79) rather than an absolute transfer-accuracy predictor, providing a training-free diagnostic for cross-architecture concept monitoring.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

GRAPE: Guided Parameter-Space Evolution for Compact Adversarial Robustness

arXiv:2606.14865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial Training (AT) improves neural network robustness, but most methods train a fixed parameter space from the start. This paper asks whether the order in which parameters become optimizable can affect the final robust solution, even when the final architecture or computation budget is controlled. We propose GRAPE, Guided Parameter-Space Evolution, a training framework for compact adversarial robustness. GRAPE combines parameter-space stabilization with progressive hidden expansion: it stabilizes robust optimization in the currently exposed space, gradually releases new optimizable dimensions, and uses an adversarial spectral utilization score to guide newly released capacity toward high-pressure modules. In contrast to fixed-structure AT, GRAPE treats robust model learning as a process of progressive parameter-space exposure and evolution. Under the standard $\ell_\infty$ threat model on CIFAR-10, with fixed-structure ResNet-18 AT as a controlled reference, GRAPE improves PGD-20 robust accuracy from 51.70% to 56.94% at a nearly matched computation budget with a FLOPs ratio of 1.009x, while reducing parameter count by about 21.4%. A sequential grow variant with the same final ResNet-18 architecture reaches 56.52% PGD-20 robust accuracy, indicating that the gain is not only due to final architecture differences but also to the parameter-space exposure path. These results suggest that guided parameter-space evolution can yield compact and robust parameter configurations under matched computation.

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

Physics-conforming Latent Twins

arXiv:2606.15053v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Surrogate models are central to scientific machine learning, where they enable fast prediction, simulation, inference, and control for complex physical systems. For time-dependent problems, however, accurate interpolation of training trajectories is not sufficient: reliable surrogates should also respect the conservation laws, invariants, admissibility conditions, and dissipative structures that give those trajectories physical meaning. We introduce Physics-conforming Latent Twins, a framework for learning latent surrogate solution operators whose dynamics satisfy selected physical principles by design. The method builds on the Latent Twin formulation by jointly learning an encoder, a decoder, and a latent flow map between arbitrary time-indexed states, while constraining the latent dynamics to preserve or dissipate prescribed structural quantities. We develop a constraint-transfer viewpoint that connects physical structure in the original state space with compatible constraints in latent space, and prove structure-preservation bounds showing how latent enforcement improves control of physical defects after decoding. We also derive algebraic conditions for latent flow maps that preserve linear and quadratic invariants or enforce dissipative inequalities. Numerical experiments on representative ODE and PDE benchmarks demonstrate improved constraint satisfaction, structural fidelity, and qualitative long-time behavior while maintaining accurate surrogate prediction.

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

LearnOpt: Recovering the Latent Cognitive Structure of Standardized Examinations via Knowledge Graphs and Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.15349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized examinations are typically treated as uniform syllabus coverage problems. We argue they are better understood as adversarial systems with stable latent cognitive structures diverging systematically from official syllabi. We introduce LearnOpt, which recovers this structure from historical question papers and generates personalized, time-bounded study plans. Applied to nine years of NEET questions (2016-2024, n=1,496), LearnOpt builds an exam knowledge graph from LLM-tagged questions, extracts a five-category latent skill distribution, and formulates study planning as a knapsack-variant optimization over prerequisite-aware subgraphs with Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. Central finding: NEET's latent skill distribution is stable within a syllabus regime (consecutive-year KL divergence 0.004-0.032 for 2016-2021, non-significant under permutation testing) but shifts significantly with NCERT's 2023 syllabus rationalization: pooling 2016-2021 (n=1,072) vs 2023-2024 (n=392) gives KL=0.040 (p=0.0005), with Elimination/Negation questions rising from ~20-29% to ~31-35%. Latent structure, while not permanently stationary, is piecewise stable, with shifts detectable and attributable to curricular events. Within either regime, subject predicts skill profile more strongly than year. An optimization evaluation, using one real and two synthetic mastery profiles, shows the skill-weighted objective produces a modest but real reordering of recommended topics over a mastery-conditioned frequency baseline. Applying the pipeline to JEE Advanced reveals a profile dominated by Multi-concept Integration (80.9% vs. 33.3% for NEET), with a JEE-vs-NEET divergence (KL=0.505) exceeding NEET's largest cross-subject divergence: exam tier shapes latent cognitive structure more than subject, which shapes it more than time within a regime. Code, knowledge graph, and annotated dataset are released publicly.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Emergent decadal predictability in Antarctic contribution to sea-level rise

Despite large uncertainties associated with future mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet, ice-sheet models show that the rate of sea-level rise from Antarctic ice loss in 2025 is strongly predictive of the rate for the next several decades, regardless of emission pathway or model complexity. This finding is robust across all models that were considered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report global mean sea-level projections, including the low-likelihood, high-impact scenarios of sea-level rise. Given this strong near-term decadal predictability, ice-sheet models that can accurately reproduce present-day ice-mass loss provide a reliable basis for near-term sea-level planning and adaptation through to mid-century. The predictability breaks down by the end of the twenty-first century as feedbacks, such as those related to marine ice-sheet retreat, begin to emerge, leading to accelerating ice loss. Drawing on these results, we identify key feedback mechanisms that can account for the transition between near-term decadal predictability and the longer-term, feedback-driven evolution, and suggest priorities for ice-sheet model development aimed at resolving long-term sea-level rise uncertainty. Although Antarctic ice loss projections diverge widely by 2100, this Perspective shows that present-day rates robustly predict mid-century sea level rise, providing a firm basis for near-term planning, while highlighting priorities for model development aimed at resolving longer-term sea level rise uncertainty.

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

Systematic Study of Dysarthric Speech Recognition: Spectral Features and Acoustic Models

arXiv:2606.19793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selections for each. The incorporation of Pitch features notably improved recognition performance, especially for sentence recognition tasks involving dysarthric speech. Through a systematic examination of the TORGO database, we have demonstrated the potential to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art Factorized Time Delay Neural Network (F-TDNN) model for recognizing dysarthric speech. Our methods, implemented with the F-TDNN model, resulted in a 4.65\% relative improvement in isolated word recognition and a 4.63\% relative improvement in sentence recognition for dysarthric speech, compared to previous research. This improvement effectively compensates for speech variability, attributable to our deliberate selection of the number of overlapping frames between consecutive training example chunks.

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

Universality in Ionic Three-body Systems Near an Ion-atom Feshbach Resonance

arXiv:2511.00325v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We calculate bound and scattering properties of a system of two neutral atoms and an ion near an atom-ion Feshbach resonance. Our results indicate that long-range atom-ion interactions lead to significant deviations from universal behavior derived from contact or van der Waals potentials. We find that ionic systems display an overall suppression of inelastic transitions leading to recombination rates and lifetimes of Efimov state orders of magnitude smaller with respect to those for neutral atoms. We further characterize the dense spectra of triatomic molecular ions with extended lifetimes. Our results provide a deeper insight on the universality and structure of three-body ionic systems and establishing them as a promising platform for exploring novel few- and many-body phenomena with long-range interactions.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Low-Rank Tensor Completion Based on Fractional Regularization with Ky Fan p-k Norm

This paper addresses low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) by proposing a novel nonconvex surrogate, namely the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan p-k norm (TNPK), to accurately approximate the tensor tubal rank. The TNPK possesses appealing properties, including scale invariance, parameter flexibility, and the existence of closed-form solutions under specific choices of p and k. With specific parameter settings of p and k, it reduces to the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan k norm (TNK) or the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Frobenius norm (TNF). We construct a LRTC model and, under the tensor null space property (NSP), prove that low-rank tensors are local minimizers of the proposed model. Moreover, we derive the proximal operator of the Ky Fan p-k inverse-norm and further develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm with guaranteed subsequential convergence under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our method against state-of-the-art competitors.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Climatic Drivers of Malaria risk in Children Under Five: A Large-Scale Analysis of individual-level data for 350,000 children in 26 Sub-Saharan African Countries

Background Malaria risk is influenced by climatic conditions, and children under five are particularly vulnerable due to their limited acquired immunity. We investigate the association between climatic factors and malaria risk in 350,000 children aged 5-59 months in sub-Saharan Africa over 18 years. Methods We included children aged 5-59 months with malaria tests from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 26 sub-Saharan African countries between 2006 and 2023. We linked these data to high-resolution climate exposures: temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, actual evapotranspiration and specific humidity. We fitted a mixed-effect logistic regression model incorporating Distributed Lag Non-linear Models (DLNM) over 1-6 month lag window for each exposure, controlling for seasonality and long-term trends. We examined effect modification by maternal education, household wealth, residential type, water source, sanitation facility, child age and sex, use of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), and the age of the household head. Results Malaria prevalence was 19.5%. Malaria risk was highest at 24 degrees (OR: 1.45, 95% CI: [1.36, 1.54]), followed by a decline at higher temperatures. This elevated risk was mainly driven by short-term exposures (1-2 months). Precipitation increased risk up to 59 ~ 120 mm (1.10, [1.07, 1.12]), after which heavier rainfall reduced risk, particularly at short- to medium-term lags (1-4 months). Soil moisture was associated with increasing risk up to ~80 mm (1.11, [1.08, 1.14]), with a plateau at higher levels. Evapotranspiration showed a strong, near-linear positive association with malaria risk. Higher specific humidity levels (>14 g/kg) presented a lower risk, reaching a 45% reduction at 17 g/kg (0.55, [0.49, 0.61]), with the strongest protective effects at short-term lags (1-2 months). Elevated malaria risk at low and moderate average temperatures was particularly evident among children who did not sleep under an ITN net. Conclusion Malaria risk in children under five is strongly shaped by climatic factors, with complex and delayed associations. The findings provide evidence to guide targeted interventions and early-warning strategies for vulnerable populations.

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

Scaling Enterprise Agent Routing: Degradation, Diagnosis, and Recovery

Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales? We study single-step routing on a 110-agent, 584-tool catalog from a deployed enterprise productivity assistant, evaluating three frontier models from 10 to 110 agents. Routing F1 on under-specified requests drops 16–23 percentage points across models. An oracle analysis decomposes the degradation into a retrieval gap (the model cannot surface the right tool) and a confusion gap (even with perfect retrieval, the oracle ceiling drops 10pp). Embedding-based shortlisting recovers +10–11pp F1 at full scale across all three models and two providers. A production annotation study (1,435 human-labeled utterances, three annotators) confirms the recovery on real traffic at +10–17pp despite 10–15pp lower absolute performance.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

No Universal Purification in Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2509.21111v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many central tasks in fundamental physics and quantum information processing are possible only insofar as mixed quantum states can be made purer. In this work, we prove that the linearity and positivity of quantum mechanics impose general restrictions on quantum purification, unveiling a new fundamental principle of quantum information processing. We first establish that no quantum operation can transform a finite number of copies of an unknown quantum state or channel into an exactly pure output that depends non-trivially on the input, thereby ruling out an important form of universal purification in both static and dynamical settings. Building on this, we show that, upon relaxing the requirement of exact purity, one can establish quantitative sample-complexity lower bounds for approximate purification that hold for arbitrary physically allowed strategies, whose scaling matches the performance of purification-related tasks across several different areas of quantum information processing. Moreover, this lower bound leads to a generalized standard quantum limit for learning arbitrary functions of a quantum state, greatly extending earlier results based on quantum Fisher information and revealing a deep connection between purification and quantum learning. Extending this principle to other important settings, we establish, for the first time, an exponential sample-complexity lower bound for approximate pure dilation state preparation and a no-go theorem for approximate bosonic Gaussian state purification with passive Gaussian operations, establishing much more stringent limitations under practical operational constraints.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Detail++: Training-Free Detail Enhancer for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Image Quality Assessment of Identity Cards Using Measures from Open Face Image Quality

This paper addresses the challenge of assessing image quality in ID cards in remote verification systems by applying capture-related quality measures from the Open Face Image Quality (OFIQ) standard to ID card images. Our preprocessing pipeline includes corner detection, perspective normalization, and comprehensive foreground masking to ensure accurate and unbiased quality measure computation. We evaluate the effectiveness of these measures by analyzing their correlation with the performance of three presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms across four diverse ID card datasets, where two datasets contain bona fide, i.e. pristine, images and two contain printed mock ID cards. Our results suggest that quality assessment based on some OFIQ measures can significantly improve PAD performance.

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

EmoMind: Decoding Affective Captions from Human Brain fMRI

Decoding visual experience from brain activity has advanced substantially, but current brain-to-text systems largely recover semantic content while discarding affect. Additionally, language models can generate emotional text when prompted with categorical labels, but such labels collapse rich inter-subject variability into coarse discrete bins. We present EmoMind, the first end-to-end pipeline for decoding affective captions directly from fMRI signals. EmoMind first retrieves a semantically grounded neutral scene description from brain-decoded visual features, then rewrites it using a continuous 34-dimensional emotion vector decoded from the same fMRI recording. To control the balance between content preservation and affective expression, we train the rewriter with classifier-free guidance against an identity-preserving null branch, enabling smooth interpolation between semantic fidelity and affective expressivity. We evaluate affective caption generation with a three-axis validation framework spanning subject-specificity, structural geometry, and causal control. We further augment this framework with a synthetic-brain substitution test that probes robustness to the measurement apparatus, and we benchmark each axis against GPT-4 prompted with brain-decoded top-5 emotion labels as a strong discrete baseline. Across two independent emotion fMRI datasets, EmoMind significantly outperforms label-prompted GPT-4 on all three axes, with the largest gains on metrics that require person-specific affective structure rather than population-level emotion aggregation. These results establish continuous brain-decoded affect as a viable control signal for individualized affective caption generation and open new directions for studying individual affective brain organisation.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

An AI-Powered Trisomy 21 Research Assistant

Down syndrome, caused by trisomy 21, increases the risk of diverse co-occurring conditions. With more than 34,000 related publications indexed in PubMed as of early 2026, keeping pace with this expanding literature is challenging. While general-purpose large language models are widely used for information retrieval, they often rely on broad training data rather than specific evidence. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves rigor and reliability of responses by linking model outputs to source texts. In research, source texts are peer-reviewed articles. Standard implementations treat all manuscript sections equally, allowing background text to rank as highly as experimental results. To focus model outputs on experimentally supported responses, we developed the T21 Research Assistant, a section-aware RAG system that prioritizes Results sections to ground responses in primary experimental evidence. The system draws exclusively from 1,789 open-access Down syndrome publications from PubMed Central, including 327 NIH INCLUDE-funded studies, and uses a multistage pipeline for query validation, retrieval, reranking, synthesis, and citation verification. Built on NVIDIA Nemotron models, it generates structured, cited responses. Evaluation using expert-curated questions demonstrated strong performance, achieving a BERTScore F1 of 0.712 and recall of 0.758, comparable to or exceeding leading proprietary and open-source models. T21 Research Assistant is available at: https://bioinformatics.cuanschutz.edu/t21-res-assi/

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

How long does it take to train an Elephant Random Walk

Authors:

arXiv:2509.15049v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how conditioning on the first $k$ steps, which we think of as training, affects the long-term behavior of the Elephant Random Walk. When the elephant is conditioned to be at position $k$ at time $k$, the first return time to the origin scales as $k^{(4-4p)/(3-4p)}$ in the diffusive regime, and grows exponentially in the critical regime. We loosely interpret this as a measurement of the rate at which the elephant forgets its training.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HyperPotter: Spell the Charm of High-Order Interactions in Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2602.05670v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advances in AIGC technologies have enabled the synthesis of highly realistic audio deepfakes capable of deceiving human auditory perception. Although numerous audio deepfake detection (ADD) methods have been developed, most rely on local temporal/spectral features or pairwise relations, overlooking high-order interactions (HOIs). HOIs capture discriminative patterns that emerge from multiple feature components beyond their individual contributions. We propose HyperPotter, a hypergraph-based framework designed to capture high-order relations associated with synergistic patterns through clustering-based hyperedges with class-aware prototype initialization. Extensive experiments on 13 test sets show that HyperPotter improves over the baseline on 11 sets, yielding an average relative EER reduction of 12.68\% across all test sets and 22.15\% on the improved sets. These results demonstrate strong cross-scenario generalization, while also revealing robustness limits under severe codec or channel distortion.

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

The Coin Flip Judge? Reliability and Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

Authors:

LLM-as-a-Judge is now widely used to rank model outputs, train reward models, and populate public leaderboards, but its run-to-run reliability remains under-characterized. We study repeated identical evaluations on 29 tasks spanning 10 categories using two OpenAI judge models (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4.1-mini), with 50 pairwise trials and 50 pointwise trials per question, supplemented by temperature and prompt-sensitivity ablations. Across judges, pairwise preferences flip on average 13.6% of the time, with 28% of questions exceeding a 20% flip rate and one question reaching 56%. GPT-4o-mini also exhibits a significant first-position bias (72% A-majority, p = 0.024). At the same time, mean pointwise score gaps are small (0.19–0.36 on a 10-point scale) and not statistically significant in aggregate, producing a pairwise–pointwise gap: judges frequently choose a winner even when their own scalar scores provide little evidence of a meaningful quality difference. Beyond within-judge instability, cross-judge agreement is only 76% ($\kappa = 0.51$), semantically equivalent prompt templates change majority outcomes in 25% of tested cases, and deterministic decoding reduces but does not eliminate inconsistency. A reliability curve analysis shows that, in our dataset, 11 repeated trials are needed for a majority vote to recover the 50-trial reference verdict with 95% probability on average, rising to 15 for high-variance questions. These findings suggest that single-trial LLM judging is often too noisy for high-stakes evaluation, and that multi-trial aggregation, position randomization, and explicit uncertainty reporting should be standard practice. Because both judges are from a single provider, cross-provider replication remains an important next step.