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

Coupled integrated photonic quantum memristors using a single photon source made of a colour center

arXiv:2602.14736v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Photonic quantum memristors provide a measurement-induced route to nonlinear and history-dependent quantum dynamics. Experimental demonstrations have so far focused on isolated devices or simple cascaded devices configurations. Here, we experimentally realize and characterize a network of two coupled photonic quantum memristors with crossed feedback, implemented on a silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit and fed by a room-temperature single-photon source based on a silicon-vacancy color center SiV$^-$ in a nanodiamond. Each memristor consists of an integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer whose transfer function is adaptively updated by photon detection events on another memristor, thus generating novel non-Markovian input-output dynamics with an enhanced memristive behaviour compared to single devices. In particular, we report inter-memristor input-output hysteresis curves exhibiting larger form factors and displaying self-intersecting loops, respectively revealing marked bistability and self-intersecting hysteresis geometry. Furthermore, numerical simulations show how these features emerge from the interplay between memory depth and relative input phase, for both intra- and inter-memristor input-output relations. We experimentally test the performance of our system in the NARMA task. Our results establish coupled integrated photonic quantum memristors as scalable nonlinear building blocks and highlight their potential for implementing compact quantum neuromorphic and reservoir computing architectures.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MoCA-Agent: A Market-of-Claims Code Agent for Financial and Numerical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial and tabular question answering requires more than fluent reasoning: answers must be grounded in the exact facts, formulas, units, signs, and scales that support them. A single misread cell or incorrect operation can silently produce a plausible but wrong result. We introduce \textsc{MOCA-Agent}, a market-of-claims code agent that replaces free-form multi-agent debate with claim-level verification. The system decomposes each question into typed atomic claims, asks specialist trader agents to buy or sell those claims, clears their orders into confidence-weighted accept/reject decisions, and synthesizes an executable Python program from market-supported evidence. A code-aware verifier then checks the program for execution, structural consistency, and common financial reasoning errors, with at most one market-aware repair round. Across ten public benchmarks spanning financial numerical reasoning, general tabular reasoning, ESG question answering, and multimodal chart reasoning, \textsc{MOCA-Agent} achieves strong performance using a fixed Qwen3.6-27B backbone, including $78.3\%$ on FinQA, $76.0\%$ on FinanceMath, $71.2\%$ on MultiHiertt, $86.9\%$ on ESGenius, and $85.6\%$ average on FinChart-Bench. These results show that aggregating evidence at the level of atomic claims, rather than whole answers, improves robustness in high-stakes numerical reasoning.\footnote{The code and data are available: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/MoCA-Agent.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validation of a Smartphone-Image-Based Computer-Vision Model for Lean Mass and Body Fat Estimation Against Dual-Energy X-ray Absorptiometry

Introduction Body composition, rather than body weight alone, is an increasingly important health metric, and preservation of lean mass has become a central concern in obesity treatment, aging, and chronic disease management. Dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) provides accurate assessment of fat and lean tissue, but its cost and logistical requirements limit repeated measurement. Computer-vision approaches show promise for estimating adiposity from smartphone images, but lean-mass estimation remains less established. Methods We evaluated a computer-vision body composition model, applied to consumer-grade smartphone photographs, against DXA in a held-out validation sample of 195 adults from an ongoing cross-sectional study. Body fat percentage and total lean mass percentage were co-primary outcomes; for total lean mass percentage, an image-only configuration (no added covariates) was pre-specified as primary. Agreement was quantified using Lin's concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) as the lead statistic, with Pearson correlation, mean absolute error, root mean square error, mean bias, and Bland-Altman limits of agreement. In secondary analyses, appendicular lean mass and total lean mass percentage were each estimated with and without routine anthropometric and demographic inputs (body weight, height, age, and sex). Results Total lean mass percentage agreed with DXA from image features alone (CCC 0.916). Body fat percentage, estimated with routine inputs added, agreed at least as closely (CCC 0.930). Adding routine inputs barely changed agreement for total lean mass percentage but markedly improved it for appendicular lean mass, an absolute quantity that scales with body size. Conclusions A smartphone-image-based model estimated both body fat and lean mass with strong agreement to DXA, with lean mass percentage from image features alone. The approach needs no fixed equipment or ionizing radiation. Whether it can track change over time, including in incretin-based weight loss where lean mass preservation is a concern, was not assessed in this cross-sectional study.

04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Ten simple rules for executing an inherited research plan in computational biology

by Sahar Javaheri Tehrani, Toni Ingolf Gossmann Trainees in computational biology frequently inherit research plans whose aims, datasets, analytical strategies, and technical constraints were defined before their arrival. These plans often emerge from grants, collaborations, legacy codebases, shared high-performance computing environments, or partially completed analyses. While such plans provide a useful scaffold, they rarely specify all implementation details, prior assumptions, evaluation criteria, or dependencies needed for reliable execution. The transition from inheriting a partially articulated plan to producing reproducible results therefore creates an execution gap: a phase in which trainees must reconstruct what the project is, which elements are fixed, which remain negotiable, and which technical or organizational assumptions need to be tested before full-scale analysis begins. In this Ten Simple Rules article, we provide a practice-oriented framework for stabilizing inherited computational biology projects before workflows, benchmarks, and decision paths become entrenched. We do not claim that the individual practices described here are novel in isolation. Rather, our contribution is to organize familiar practices into a sequenced framework for a recurrent but under-articulated phase of computational research: inherited-plan execution. Computational biology makes this phase especially important because projects often combine heterogeneous datasets, fragile software environments, undocumented preprocessing choices, benchmarking assumptions, distributed collaborators, and asymmetrical access to contextual knowledge. By making this transition visible and operational, the rules aim to help trainees, supervisors, and collaborators reduce ambiguity, test feasibility, document decisions, and support reproducible and equitable project execution under real-world constraints.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Observation of alignment tensor effects in metastability-exchange collisions with highly polarized 3He ensembles

arXiv:2606.20330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly polarized 3He ensembles prepared by metastability-exchange optical pumping (MEOP) have been widely used in precision measurements and fundamental physics. Metastability-exchange (ME) collisions, serving as the basis of MEOP, are traditionally described in terms of atomic orientation, while the significant contributions of metastable alignment tensor at high polarization remain unexplored. In this work, we develop a linearized model under mean-field approximation to investigate alignment tensor effects in highly polarized 3He , which originate from the metastable F = 3/2 manifold and are revealed through ME-induced relaxation and frequency shift. By means of free-induction-decay (FID) measurements, a pronounced dependence on nuclear polarization is experimentally observed in the response of the ground-state-metastable hybrid 3He ensembles to the external magnetic field. Furthermore, after obtaining the characteristics of tensor-induced phenomena, we demonstrate good agreement between the experiment and the theory. This work advances the understanding of nuclear spin dynamics in highly polarized 3He using MEOP. It further provides applications in systematic error correction of high-accuracy magnetometry, as well as in optimal protocol for the generation of nuclear spin-squeezed states.

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

Rapid Poison: Practical Poisoning Attacks Against the Rapid Response Framework

The Rapid Response (RR) framework, deployed in production systems, including Anthropic's ASL-3 safeguards, continuously improves jailbreak-detection classifiers. When new jailbreaks emerge that bypass these classifiers, Rapid Response generates synthetic variants for training, helping the model generalize from the new attacks and quickly adapt. We reveal that prompt injection can infiltrate this pipeline to deliver poisoned samples into the classifier's training set, enabling two attack objectives: (I) targeted poisoning attacks that create false positives on harmless samples by categorizing them as a jailbreak, with a specific desired feature (e.g., certain formatting, subject, or keyword), (II) concept-based backdoor attacks that induce false negatives on jailbreak inputs, generalizing even to jailbreaks from attack strategies the defender explicitly trained against, when the backdoor trigger is present. Importantly, our threat model restricts adversaries to modifying only jailbreak samples (not benign data or labels), a constraint unexplored by prior work that makes the second objective particularly challenging. We address this with Omission Attack, which exploits a new phenomenon: when training on concept-absent unsafe samples, the classifier misassociates that concept's presence with the safe label. Both attacks cause substantial and in some cases near-complete label flipping at only a 1% poisoning rate, achieving up to 100% false positive rates and up to 96% false negative rates.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Sequential Hiring of Contingent Workers Through Learning-Based Optimization

arXiv:2606.18438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we study a sequential workforce management problem in a contingent labor setting with uncertainty in both worker production and labor supply. A firm seeks to maximize cumulative profit by maintaining an active team of fixed size while learning worker productivity over time. We emphasize two critical operational frictions in this problem: replacing workers is costly, and workers may not be available immediately for hiring because of, for example, prior job commitments, scheduling constraints, or onboarding procedures. Thus, hiring decisions take effect only after a random delay. We formulate this problem as a stochastic multi-play bandit with costly switching and delayed actions, and develop a learning-based hiring policy, DR-UCB (DelayedReplacement-UCB), that makes replacement and hiring decisions sequentially through learning cycles. In each cycle, the policy uses real-time production data to determine when to initiate workforce changes and which workers to replace and hire. We show that the leading-order regret of the proposed policy matches its lower bound in its dependence on the time horizon. Our numerical experiments show that DR-UCB outperforms benchmark policies.

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

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Do We Still Need Humans in the Loop? Comparing Human and LLM Annotation in Active Learning for Hostility Detection

Instruction-tuned LLMs can annotate thousands of instances at low cost. This raises two questions for active learning (AL): can LLM labels replace human labels within the AL loop, and does AL remain necessary when entire corpora can be cheaply labeled? We investigate both on a new dataset of 277,902 German political TikTok comments (25,974 LLM-labeled, 5,000 human-annotated), comparing LLM and human annotation across seven conditions, four encoders, and 10 random seeds. Under a two-question interface that mirrors the human annotation task, LLM annotation at scale outperforms human-supervised classifiers at roughly one-tenth the cost (\$28 for GPT-5.2 Batch API vs. \$316 for Prolific). The advantage holds for both a closed-source (GPT-5.2) and an open-weight (Qwen3.5-122B-10B) LLM, is robust under soft-label evaluation, and is unlocked specifically by the two-question decomposition; a holistic single-prompt baseline only ties with human supervision. AL provides no reliable advantage over random sampling under either LLM annotator. However, error structure varies sharply: only GPT-5.2 under the two-question interface produces classifiers with near-human FP/FN balance, while other LLM variants over-flag border-control and economic competition discourse. We release the dataset and code.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI

arXiv:2606.14502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

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

Radar-Guided Polynomial Fitting for Metric Depth Estimation

We propose POLAR, a novel radar-guided depth estimation method that introduces polynomial fitting to efficiently transform scaleless depth predictions from pretrained monocular depth estimation (MDE) models into metric depth maps. Unlike existing approaches that rely on complex architectures or expensive sensors, our method is grounded in a fundamental insight: although MDE models often infer reasonable local depth structure within each object or local region, they may misalign these regions relative to one another, making a linear scale and shift (affine) transformation insufficient given three or more of these regions. To address this limitation, we use polynomial coefficients predicted from cheap, ubiquitous radar data to adaptively adjust predictions non-uniformly across depth ranges. In this way, POLAR generalizes beyond affine transformations and is able to correct such misalignments by introducing inflection points. Importantly, our polynomial fitting framework preserves structural consistency through a novel training objective that enforces local monotonicity via first-derivative regularization. POLAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three datasets, outperforming existing methods by an average of 24.9% in MAE and 33.2% in RMSE, while also achieving state-of-the-art efficiency in terms of latency and computational cost.

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

Learning on a Razor's Edge: Identifiability and Singularity of Polynomial Neural Networks

arXiv:2505.11846v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study function spaces parametrized by neural networks, referred to as neuromanifolds. Specifically, we focus on deep Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with an activation function that is a sufficiently generic polynomial. First, we address the identifiability problem, showing that, for almost all functions in the neuromanifold of an MLP, there exist only finitely many parameter choices yielding that function. For CNNs, the parametrization is generically one-to-one. As a consequence, we compute the dimension of the neuromanifold. Second, we describe singular points of neuromanifolds. We characterize singularities completely for CNNs, and partially for MLPs. In both cases, they arise from sparse subnetworks. For MLPs, we prove that these singularities often correspond to critical points of the mean-squared error loss, which does not hold for CNNs. This provides a geometric explanation of the sparsity bias of MLPs. All of our results leverage tools from algebraic geometry.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ART: Attention Run-time Termination for Efficient Large Language Model Decoding

Long-context decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is constrained by the cost of accessing and processing the Key-Value (KV) cache. Despite evidence that attention outputs depend jointly on keys and values, most existing KV management methods rely on key-only pruning, since incorporating values incurs prohibitive overhead. In this paper, we propose Attention Run-time Termination (ART), a lightweight run-time mechanism that tracks accumulated attention outputs during kernel execution and terminates subsequent KV block accesses once further contributions become negligible. Rather than replacing KV selection, ART dynamically terminates redundant KV traversal on top of existing dense or sparse attention policies. We introduce a stability-based criterion that monitors both magnitude and directional changes of intermediate attention outputs and provideds a theoretical characterization of the resulting truncation error. Experiments on the LongBench and RULER Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks show that ART increases the generation throughput of existing KV-cache methods by up to 20%, without compromising the result quality.

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

Towards Understanding What State Space Models Learn About Code

arXiv:2602.06774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the Transformer architecture. Prior work shows that, when trained under comparable conditions, SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks. However, their internal mechanisms remain a black box. We present the first systematic analysis of what SSM-based code models learn along with the direct comparison between SSM and Transformer models in this domain. Our analysis shows that SSMs capture syntactic and semantic structure more effectively than Transformers during pretraining but forgets certain relations during fine-tuning on some tasks. To investigate this behavior, we introduce SSM-Interpret, a frequency-domain framework that exposes a spectral shift toward short-range dependencies during fine-tuning. Guided by these findings, we propose architectural modifications that significantly improve the performance of SSM-based code model by upto +6 MRR on NLCodeSearch. This demonstrates that our analysis not only explains model behavior but also leads directly to better designs.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

APOSM: Pairwise preference learning improves generative small-molecule design

Small-molecule lead refinement is constrained by the cost of synthesizing and assaying candidates, making the surrogate models that prioritize compounds for experimental testing central to the design process. The reliability of such surrogates is limited by the noise and sparsity of screening measurements. We show that training the surrogate on pairwise comparisons between candidate molecules, rather than on absolute predicted scores, yields a substantially more reliable signal for active candidate selection in this regime. We develop APOSM, an active-learning algorithm that combines a fragment-based generator, a pairwise message-passing graph neural network surrogate, and probabilistic ranking inside a batched acquisition loop. On the Practical Molecular Optimization benchmark and a GPCR ligand rediscovery task, APOSM improves target attainment and sampling efficiency over unguided fragment-based optimization, the Graph-GA genetic algorithm, and a pointwise-regression ablation, with the largest gains on tasks where absolute scores are hardest to calibrate.

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

Chroma-gated, differentiable OKLCH interpolation: Continuous Oklab fallback for color-cast reduction

OKLCH – the cylindrical (lightness, chroma, hue) form of Ottosson's Oklab color space – is the interpolation space recommended by CSS Color 4 for gradients and color-mix(), and it is now broadly deployed. Its polar parameterization, however, casts color near the neutral axis in two ways: (1) an inter-hue detour between two chromatic endpoints that sweeps through an unintended hue (blue to yellow visibly passing through green), and (2) an off-line bow when one endpoint is achromatic. Existing remedies are uniformly two-valued – a threshold switch that fires only at an achromatic endpoint – so they address only (2); on chromatic pairs every one of them reduces to raw OKLCH, leaving the (1) inter-hue cast untreated. We introduce Continuous Oklab fallback (COFb), a one-parameter, differentiable chroma gate $w(C)=C^n/(C^n+\sigma^n)$ that continuously blends the OKLCH path toward the linear Oklab path as chroma falls. A single gate reduces the (1) cast that the two-valued family leaves untreated and unifies the handling of (1) and (2) without any endpoint test. We characterize a cast-hue trade-off frontier, adopt a default ($n=1$, the rational Michaelis-Menten form; $\sigma\approx0.19$ for a typical sRGB palette, from a normalization-independent cast-half criterion), and verify the gate's properties symbolically. At the default, COFb halves the inter-hue path detour (mean lateral deviation -49.5%, chroma-weighted hue excursion -35.5%). We also state the method's limits: on (2) alone the two-valued switch remains better, and like any Cartesian blend COFb does not preserve chroma. In deployment, COFb runs entirely in plain Oklab (a,b) to sRGB, so it serves as a fallback that delivers the same cast-reduced gradients where modern CSS color interpolation (color-mix(in oklch) and the like) is unavailable – older engines, image and video pipelines, or GPU shaders.

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

Cross-Dataset, Age, and Gender Generalization: A Comprehensive Analysis of Fine-Tuning Strategies for Low-Resource Children's ASR

arXiv:2606.19791v1 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.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

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.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Artificial Intelligence-informed mobile behavioural interventions to support adolescents mental health in schools: protocol for a randomised controlled trial using the MindCraft app

Background: Children and young people (CYP) are particularly affected by mental health problems. Mobile apps provide a scalable and accessible approach to adolescent mental health support, and schools are well-positioned to address multiple risk factors and deliver large-scale interventions. By combining active (self-reported) and passive (sensor-derived) data, mobile apps can model mental states and deliver context-aware support. Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables adaptive, context-aware recommendations tailored to each user. However, there is limited research on AI-based mental health interventions in community CYP. MindCraft is a mobile app designed to monitor adolescents mental health using active and passive data and provide AI-informed recommendations ("nudges"). This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of personalised AI nudges delivered through MindCraft on improving mental health outcomes among adolescents in schools in the United Kingdom. Methods: The study is a three-arm RCT using a prospective cohort of secondary school students aged 14-19. Following informed consent, participants complete a baseline online assessment at school and download MindCraft. The primary outcome is the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire global and subscale scores. Secondary outcomes include the Eating Disorders Diagnostic Scale, the Sleep Condition Indicator Questionnaire, the Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviours Interview, the Self-Efficacy Questionnaire for Children and the World Health Organisation-Five Well-Being Index. Participants are randomised to: (1) an AI-informed intervention group receiving personalised nudges, (2) an active control receiving non-personalised nudges, or (3) a control group with self-monitoring only. Participants use the app for four weeks, with follow-up at one month. Repeated-measures analyses will assess changes across time points. Discussion: We hypothesise that AI nudges will have a greater positive effect on mental health outcomes at one month than general nudges and self-monitoring. Our findings will provide key evidence on the effectiveness of personalised mobile AI recommendations for adolescents mental health and inform school-based mental health prevention and early intervention. This study will contribute evidence on the ethical, acceptable, and scalable integration of AI-enabled digital mental health tools within public health and educational systems, with implications for the design of future digital public health interventions and policies supporting their safe integration in schools.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Probing Semantic Alignment, Lexical Invariance, and Syntactic Influence in LLM Metaphor Processing

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on metaphor detection and interpretation tasks, yet it remains unclear what such behavioral success reveals about metaphor processing. We present a diagnostic analysis that examines the limits of behavioral evidence by probing three complementary dimensions: semantic attribute alignment, lexical invariance, and syntactic sensitivity. Using geometric probing, we assess whether model-generated interpretations align with reference semantic attributes; through context-varying substitution, we analyze the stability of lexical associations between metaphorical and literal expressions; and via controlled syntactic perturbations, we examine sensitivity in metaphor detection. Our analysis reveals that LLM-generated interpretations can exhibit semantic drift relative to reference attributes; stable lexical anchors persist across contextual conditions, potentially supporting conventional metaphors while biasing novel metaphors requiring contextual integration; and detection performance is sensitive to syntactic irregularities. These findings suggest that strong behavioral performance may reflect heterogeneous underlying signals, highlighting the need for caution when interpreting metaphor benchmarks as evidence of robust, integrated semantic understanding.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SFT Overtraining Predicts Rank Inversion via Entropy Collapse Under RLVR

The standard heuristic of selecting the SFT checkpoint with the highest pass@1 for GRPO can fail when SFT compresses the rollout distribution. For binary rewards, the expected within group advantage variance is $p(1{-}p)(g{-}1)/g$; when early GRPO drives $p$ below $p^*(g)$, most groups have identical rewards and provide no group relative signal. We study SFT depth ladders for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B. We test Qwen2.5-Coder-3B across five depths and three seeds, and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B across four matched depths and three seeds. On Qwen, pre RL pass@1 rises with SFT depth, but peak GRPO pass@10 falls from $0.806$ to $0.481$ (3 seed mean, $n{=}20$); pre RL entropy is positively associated with the GRPO outcome ($\rho{=}{+}0.69$). On DeepSeek, pass@1 remains far above $p^*(8){=}0.083$, and GRPO outcomes compress rather than invert. A two stage diagnostic, combining pre RL entropy triage with an early GRPO entropy monitor, flags high risk checkpoints and can stop failing runs early. Simple KL to reference regularisation and label smoothing variants do not rescue the collapsed Qwen checkpoint in our setting, suggesting the failure is not a trivial GRPO hyperparameter artefact.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Leptomeningeal Collateral Detection on DSA via Vessel-Graph Neural Networks

Leptomeningeal collaterals (LMCs) are an important prognostic factor in acute ischemic stroke. Existing automated methods rely on CT angiography (CTA), but individual LMCs are often too small to be resolved on CTA, limiting these methods to coarse collateral scoring. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) visualizes individual collaterals at superior resolution, yet current assessment remains subjective, relying on manual grading scales that suffer from poor inter-rater agreement. We present a framework that formulates collateral detection as the classification of individual vessel segments on a graph derived from DSA. A hybrid graph-pixel architecture combines a topology-aware graph branch with a dense pixel branch, fused in a shared node-probability space. In a five-fold cross-validation setting, the fused model achieves a PR-AUC of 0.434, outperforming the graph-only (0.403) and pixel-only (0.362) baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first method to enable the individualization of LMCs in DSA, allowing for precise per-vessel quantitative assessment. This integration shifts DSA assessment toward objective evaluation, supporting future biomarker and pattern discovery for individual LMCs.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological positions embedded into the mechanism of the models have been neglected, leaving them imagined as "black boxes." In a bid to expand, rather than replace, dataset critique, this paper examines the mechanisms of the latent diffusion model in terms of the problems they were brought in to solve on behalf of computer vision engineers, and the decisions each component was tasked with automating. I interpret that ensemble through the histories of its parts and the theory of vision the system inscribes into every generated image. Drawing on Impett and Offert's notion of neural exchange value, I offer this analysis to argue that the model operates as a neural economy: a contained symbolic system that abstracts social communication into commensurable vectors as it transfers the social sphere into parcels for sale. Tracing the training and generation pipelines component by component reveals what each operation displaces, and how it further entrenches the logics of platform and attention economies over social communication. The paper warns that any critique fixated exclusively on copyright and commodity defenses risks reaffirming the very fetishism the model produces, and argues instead for centering social exchange.

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

Signals of Provenance: Practices & Challenges of Navigating Indicators in AI-Generated Media for Sighted and Blind Individuals

arXiv:2505.16057v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-Generated (AIG) content has become increasingly widespread by recent advances in generative models and the easy-to-use tools that have significantly lowered the technical barriers for producing highly realistic audio, images, and videos through simple natural language prompts. In response, platforms are adopting provable provenance with platforms recommending AIG to be self-disclosed and signaled to users. However, these indicators may be often missed, especially when they rely solely on visual cues and make them ineffective to users with different sensory abilities. To address the gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews (N=28) with 15 sighted and 13 BLV participants to examine their interaction with AIG content through self-disclosed AI indicators. Our findings reveal diverse mental models and practices, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of content-based (e.g., title, description) and menu-aided (e.g., AI labels) indicators. While sighted participants leveraged visual and audio cues, BLV participants primarily relied on audio and existing assistive tools, limiting their ability to identify AIG. Across both groups, they frequently overlooked menu-aided indicators deployed by platforms and rather interacted with content-based indicators such as title and comments. We uncovered usability challenges stemming from inconsistent indicator placement, unclear metadata, and cognitive overload. These issues were especially critical for BLV individuals due to the insufficient accessibility of interface elements. We provide practical recommendations and design implications for future AIG indicators across several dimensions.