Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:3e12669e992120b285bda34c261656ed

Shared Polygenic Architecture Across Arteriopathies: An Integrative Cross-Trait Analysis

Authors:

Brennan↗S. O↗CADISP Consortium↗Tinworth↗A. C↗Daghlas↗Le Grand↗Rioux↗Kelly↗P. J↗Gill↗Debette↗…

Background: Non-monogenic arteriopathies are often classified as distinct entities according to the arterial territory involved, yet they share clinical features and may co-occur in the same individual. This pattern suggests shared susceptibility across anatomically distinct arteriopathies, potentially driven by common biological and genetic mechanisms. Methods: We investigated the shared genetic architecture of five arteriopathies (cervical artery dissection (CeAD), intracranial aneurysm (IA), spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), aortic aneurysm and dissection (AAD), and fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD)) using LD score regression, Association analysis based on SubSETs (ASSET), pairwise Multi-Trait Analysis of Genome-wide association summary statistics (MTAG), pleiotropy mapping and Mendelian randomization (MR) to identify shared loci and prioritise candidate causal genes. Results: LD score regression identified significant positive genetic correlations between CeAD-SCAD (rg = 0.64), IA-AAD (rg = 0.33), IA-SCAD (rg = 0.37), CeAD-AAD (rg = 0.56) and SCAD-AAD (rg = 0.20). ASSET identified 37 shared independent loci, and in MTAG analyses, one novel locus was identified for CeAD and SCAD (SLC39A8) and one for IA (FGF5). 13 loci showed strong cross-trait colocalization, including PHACTR1, LRP1, and CDKN2B-AS1. Using the Genotype-Phenotype Map, we found that arteriopathy-associated variants colocalized with blood pressure- and migraine-related traits, while many showed effect directions opposite to those observed for coronary artery disease. Proteome-wide MR identified 67 circulating proteins associated with at least one trait, including ECM1 and SHISA5 for CeAD and FGF5 for IA, with 17 supported by colocalization. Transcriptome-wide MR identified 204 colocalized tissue?specific signals, of which, 14 were shared across multiple traits. Enrichment analyses implicated pathways related to vascular development, smooth muscle cell function, extracellular matrix organization, and TGF-? signaling. Conclusions: These findings support shared genetic architecture across anatomically distinct arteriopathies, implicating pathways involved in vascular structure and prioritising therapeutic targets for future mechanistic investigation.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12896

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

Authors:

Junfeng Guo Heng Huang↗

arXiv:2606.12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent's internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose \texttt{PolicyGuard}, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16408

MUNI: Multimodal Unified Latent Diffusion for Coherent Any-to-Any Generation

Authors:

Kyeongmin Yeo↗Yunhong Min↗Minhyuk Sung↗

arXiv:2606.16408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce MUNI, an end-to-end multimodal latent diffusion framework for any-to-any generation that unifies subset-conditioned cross-modal generation and unconditional joint sampling through a shared stochastic latent. Existing multimodal generative models are largely LLM-based, which limits leveraging modality-specific generators and requires text-paired data for training. Recent diffusion- and flow-based any-to-any extensions take a different direction but still rely on text-aligned embeddings, fully-paired training, or matched-dimensionality deterministic mappings. MUNI rests on two complementary contributions, one architectural and one in the training objective. First, we extend latent diffusion to multimodal any-to-any generation end-to-end: instead of the standard two-stage recipe that precomputes a frozen latent space and then fits a prior over it, MUNI jointly trains modality-specific encoders, expressive decoders, and a single shared flow-based prior under one objective. Second, we identify that the standard aggregation rules of multimodal variational inference are insufficient once coupled with a learned prior and expressive decoders. A suitable shared latent must simultaneously satisfy coherence across generated modalities, predictive sufficiency of subset latents, and minimality of the latent content. We propose a routed training objective whose structural choices align the latent with these criteria and admit a minimal-sufficiency characterization in the realizable setting. Experiments on PolyMNIST-Quadrant-Labels and a large-scale image-text-audio benchmark show MUNI matching or exceeding the strongest baselines on conditional generation while opening its largest margins on unconditional coherence. Project page: https://muni-proj.github.io/.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14299

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

Authors:

Jiazhen Huang↗Xiao Chen↗Zhiming Liu↗Yaru Sun↗Jingyan Jiang↗Zhi Wang↗

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment. Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently been extended to CLIP as a lightweight solution, leading to a rapidly growing body of TTA4CLIP methods. However, empirical progress in this area has largely outpaced our understanding of what truly drives adaptation, where their gains originate, and under which shifts they remain reliable. In this paper, we take a step back from the pursuit of state-of-the-art accuracy and conduct a systematic controlled study of TTA4CLIP. We first organize existing methods into three unified paradigms according to what is updated at test time. We then introduce TTABC, an open-source TTA Benchmark for CLIP, which standardizes evaluation protocols and integrates more than 20 representative methods. Our controlled empirical analysis focuses on three key areas. First, we determine the driving factors in parameter-based methods, revealing that adaptation gains are primarily driven by test-time evidence and reliable proxies rather than heavy optimization. Second, we explore evidence utilization beyond heavy parameter tuning, showing that competitive and efficient performance can be achieved through cross- or current-sample evidence and lightweight prototype updates. Finally, we demonstrate that there is no silver bullet for TTA: no single adaptation paradigm is universally optimal, and the preferred paradigm depends on the nature of shift. We hope our benchmark and study provide a clearer understanding of the current TTA4CLIP landscape and establish a foundation for further research.

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05.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:58f2747a9adbd0e64461bec9c25fcfc9

Food Colorings in Child-Targeted Ultra-Processed Foods in Brazil: Market Prevalence and Parental Perceptions

Authors:

Silva Nunes↗Pereira Eberle↗M. F↗F. Grilo↗Zancheta↗C. Sylvetsky↗Duran↗A. C↗

Child-targeted marketing on packaged foods can shape children's food preferences and parents' purchasing decisions, yet many products with child-targeted marketing are ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and contain cosmetic additives such as food colorings, which have raised concerns about adverse effects on children's health and behavior. This mixed-methods study examined the prevalence of food colorings in child-directed UPFs and explored parents' perceptions and knowledge of these additives in beverages commonly consumed by children. Quantitative data were obtained from the Mintel Global New Products Database to identify child-directed products launched in Brazil between 2018 and 2021, measured as having at least one child-targeted marketing strategy in the food package, and whether they contained food colorings. Qualitative data came from seven focus groups with parents of children aged 2-5 and 6-11 years in Brazil, alongside a brief survey assessing participants' ability to identify food colorings on product labels. Among 5,078 UPFs launched during the study period, 23.0% contained child-targeted marketing, and 40.3% of these had food colorings. The highest prevalence was observed in carbonated beverages, candies, and ice creams, in which more than half of products contained food colorings. Parents generally understood that food colorings are used to make products more attractive to children and associated them with potential health risks, but reported difficulties avoiding them. These findings highlight the widespread presence of food colorings in child-targeted UPFs in Brazil and underscore the need for stronger regulatory measures to restrict the use of food colorings and improve labelling on food packages.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13100

LEDGER: A Long-Context Benchmark of Corporate Annual Reports for Grounded Financial Retrieval and Extraction

Authors:

Charles Moslonka↗Amaury de Vitry↗Arthur Garnier↗Hicham Randrianarivo↗Emmanuel Malherbe↗

Finance reporting is a natural proving ground for large language models, and the very-long-context capabilities of recent models across all sizes make rigorous evaluation in this domain an increasingly pressing need. Yet most public financial resources reduce the task to plain-text SEC 10-K filings paired with a handful of question-answer items. We release LEDGER (Long-context Evaluation of Documents for Grounded Extraction and Retrieval), a corpus of 4,999 digitized corporate annual reports - full documents with figures, tables, and narrative, not just regulatory filings. Each report is labeled with 31 consolidated financial KPIs to be extracted and linked to the market's reaction at the earnings date. From this data we derive three evaluation benchmarks spanning the difficulty spectrum: a pure page-level KPI retrieval task with TREC-style relevance judgments over 118,048 questions in natural language, a conversational "needle-in-a-haystack" single-value lookup, and a full KPI extraction task, both from long, numerically dense reports. We additionally provide human OCR-quality annotations with inter-annotator agreement and the complete extraction, validation, and scoring toolchain. We further demonstrate the dataset's research utility with a case study linking CEO-letter rhetoric to post-publication market impact.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20344

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

Authors:

Mar\'ia Gragera Garc\'es↗Lirand\"e Pira↗

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.00791

Geometry of Reason: Spectral Signatures of Valid Mathematical Reasoning

Authors:

Valentin No\"el↗

Verifying whether a language model is genuinely reasoning or pattern-matching remains an open problem: learned verifiers are expensive, and output-based heuristics are brittle. We show that valid mathematical reasoning induces a measurable, training-free spectral signature in transformer attention. By treating each attention matrix as a weighted token graph, we extract four diagnostics: Fiedler value, High-Frequency Energy Ratio (HFER), spectral entropy, and smoothness, that require no learned parameters. Experiments across seven models from four architectural families yield effect sizes up to Cohen's $d = 3.30$ ($p < 10^{-116}$), enabling $85$–$96\%$ single-threshold classification accuracy. Two findings sharpen the interpretation. First, Platonic validity: the spectral signal tracks logical coherence rather than compiler acceptance, proofs rejected for timeouts or missing imports are correctly classified as valid, a distinction confirmed by a manual audit ($\kappa = 0.82$, $n = 51$). Second, architectural determinism: Sliding Window Attention shifts the discriminative feature from HFER to smoothness ($d = 2.09$, $p < 10^{-48}$), showing that attention design governs which spectral channel encodes reasoning quality. Causal ablation confirms the signature traces induction-head circuits. The method generalises to informal chain-of-thought ($d = 0.78$, $p < 10^{-3}$), and in proof search, HFER reranking improves Best-of-16 Pass@1 by $+4.4$–$6.6$\%, matching $98\%$ of the AUC of fully supervised probes with zero labels. Spectral graph analysis is a principled, architecture-aware primitive for reasoning verification.

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09.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20192

Optimal multi-spectral squeezing via deterministic 2D-phase optimization

Authors:

Bastien Oriot↗Peter Namdar↗Emilie Gillet↗RL Rincon Celis↗Valentina Parigi↗

arXiv:2606.20192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization routines are ubiquitous in quantum information technologies and essential to reach the resource levels required by quantum protocols. Specifically, multi-spectral squeezing for use in such protocols requires that losses be kept minimal at every stage, including coherent detection, which is performed by interfering the signal with a classical local-oscillator beam. This in turn requires control over all optical degrees of freedom of the beam in order to optimize the detection. The most general framework for this optimization relies on agnostic, off-the-shelf machine-learning techniques. Here we take the opposite approach: by focusing on a physical description of the specific optical process, we develop a deterministic sequential algorithm that provably reaches the global maximum of the visibility in a pixel basis and scales linearly with the number of pixels, thereby offering an efficient and theoretically grounded alternative to black-box optimization. In our waveguide-based setup, the optimized mask increases the visibility from 76% to 84%, corresponding to a 20% gain in mode-matching efficiency. Multi-spectral squeezing measurements confirm that this improvement translates directly into quantum readout: for the most squeezed spectral mode, the squeezing increases from $-2.08$ dB to $-2.64$ dB, consistent with the inferred efficiency gain. These results establish deterministic spatial phase shaping as an effective, interpretable route to enhanced multimode squeezing in waveguide platforms.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16626

Using AI in engineering education: a balancing act, driven by clear purpose

Authors:

Olya Kudina↗

arXiv:2606.16626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Based on a questionnaire of 100 higher-education students, predominantly from engineering-related fields, and a critical review of recent literature, this chapter examines how students use and perceive Large Language Models (LLMs) in engineering education. Students primarily value LLMs for writing support, conceptual clarification, coding assistance, and brainstorming, while simultaneously expressing concerns about inaccuracies, bias, overreliance, academic integrity, and the burden of verification. Through an analysis of two dominant metaphors, namely LLMs as an "oracle" and as a "tutor," the chapter shows how these systems cultivate expectations of authority, expertise, and personalized learning that often exceed their actual capabilities. The chapter further argues that students' attachment to the promises of efficiency and personalized support reflects a form of "cruel optimism," where the perceived benefits of LLMs often depend on the very skills, vigilance, and expertise that students are still developing. Overall, the chapter argues for a purpose-driven and context-sensitive approach to AI integration in engineering education, emphasizing critical AI literacy, reflective assessment design, pedagogical caution, and consideration of broader ethical and environmental impacts.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2602.00945

Neural FOXP2 – Language Specific Neuron Steering for Targeted Language Improvement in LLMs

Authors:

Anusa Saha↗Tanmay Joshi↗Vinija Jain↗Aman Chadha↗Amitava Das↗

LLMs are multilingual by training, yet their lingua franca is often English, reflecting English language dominance in pretraining. Other languages remain in parametric memory but are systematically suppressed. We argue that language defaultness is governed by a sparse, low-rank control circuit, language neurons, that can be mechanistically isolated and safely steered. We introduce Neural FOXP2, that makes a chosen language (Hindi or Spanish) primary in a model by steering language-specific neurons. Neural FOXP2 proceeds in three stages: (i) Localize: We train per-layer SAEs so each activation decomposes into a small set of active feature components. For every feature, we quantify English vs. Hindi/Spanish selectivity overall logit-mass lift toward the target-language token set. Tracing the top-ranked features back to their strongest contributing units yields a compact language-neuron set. (ii) Steering directions: We localize controllable language-shift geometry via a spectral low-rank analysis. For each layer, we build English to target activation-difference matrices and perform layerwise SVD to extract the dominant singular directions governing language change. The eigengap and effective-rank spectra identify a compact steering subspace and an empirically chosen intervention window (where these directions are strongest and most stable). (iii) Steer: We apply a signed, sparse activation shift targeted to the language neurons. Concretely, within low to mid layers we add a positive steering along the target-language dominant directions and a compensating negative shift toward the null space for the English neurons, yielding controllable target-language defaultness.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.18649

Gender Bias in LLM Hiring Decisions: Evidence from a Japanese Context and Evaluation of Mitigation Strategies

Authors:

Serena A. Hoffstedde↗Machiko Hirota↗Akshara Nadayanur Sathis Kanna↗Rihito Kotani↗Ujwal Kumar↗Gabriele Trovato↗Phan Xuan Tan↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in hiring workflows, yet most research on gender bias in LLM hiring decisions has focused on English-language, Western-format resumes. This study examines whether pro-female gender bias extends to a Japanese corporate context and evaluates two practical mitigation strategies. Using a counterfactual resume design with 60 Japanese rirekisho-format resumes, 12 name pairs selected on linguistically grounded gender-signal criteria, and five state-of-the-art LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Llama 3.3 70B), we conducted 43,200 API calls across baseline, prompt instruction, and privacy filter conditions. A crossed random-effects linear mixed model confirms a significant pro-female bias across all five models, replicating Western findings in a non-Western context. A prompt-level gender-neutrality instruction produces no meaningful reduction in bias. A name-reliance analysis formally identifies the candidate name as the primary gender channel: removing the name from the prompt reduces the female effect by nearly its full magnitude. An unexpected incompatibility between the privacy filter and GPT-4o's content safety filter, resulting in a 42% refusal rate, highlights a practical deployment challenge for name anonymization in LLM-assisted recruitment pipelines.

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13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11947

Controlled ion-ion interactions and cavity-enhanced emission of a coherent dinuclear Eu$^{3+}$ complex

Authors:

Evgenij Vasilenko↗Vishnu Unni Chorakkunnath↗Barbora Brachnakova↗Nicholas Lester Jobbitt↗Senthil Kumar Kuppusamy↗David Hunger↗Mario Ruben↗

arXiv:2606.11947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular rare-earth-ion complexes offer unique opportunities for quantum technologies by combining the intrinsic coherence properties of rare-earth ions with chemically tunable molecular environments. A crucial capability is the realization of multi-qubit architectures with defined qubit couplings to enable two-qubit quantum gates. Here, we investigate the optical coherence properties and excitation-induced interactions of two Eu$^{3+}$-based molecular complexes, comparing a mononuclear reference system with a dinuclear analogue in which two Eu$^{3+}$ ions are positioned at a well-defined intramolecular distance of about 7 Angstrom. Using cryogenic ensemble spectroscopy, including spectral hole burning, free-induction decay, and photon echo measurements at temperatures down to 100 mK, we demonstrate long optical coherence times $T_{2,o}$ of up to 9 $\mu$s. As a key step toward scalable multi-qubit architectures, a control-target sequence was implemented to probe conditional ion-ion interactions, revealing a stronger interaction-induced dephasing in the dinuclear complex. Finally, we show the integration of the dinuclear complex into a fiber-based optical microcavity, and observe an 380-fold emission enhancement of the $\mathrm{}^5\mathrm{D}_0\rightarrow\mathrm{}^7\mathrm{F}_0$ transition. Together, these results position molecular rare-earth complexes as versatile and chemically tunable building blocks for scalable quantum technologies.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2601.00567

Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

Authors:

Jeyun Lee↗Junhyoung Lee↗Wonbin Kweon↗Bowen Jin↗Yu Zhang↗Susik Yoon↗Dongha Lee↗Hwanjo Yu↗Jiawei Han↗Seongku Kang↗

arXiv:2601.00567v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.

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15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19538

ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence

Authors:

Ashim Dhor↗Rasel Mondal↗Pin Yu Chen↗

arXiv:2606.19538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases – locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction – and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.

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16.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:155288d70a68326f088edbb51bfd2dc9

Integrative Mechanisms of Early Clinical and Research Training (ECART) in Orthopaedic Medical Education: A Qualitative Single-Case Study

Authors:

Lou↗Liu↗Xu↗Xiao↗Ma↗Shen↗Wang↗Kong↗Feng↗

Background: Early clinical exposure and student participation in research are important components of medical training. They may support learning motivation, evidence literacy, and self-directed learning. In many programmes, however, clinical training and research training remain separated. Few studies have explained, within a real teaching team, how learners turn clinical phenomena into researchable questions and how research participation can reshape their clinical understanding. Early Clinical and Research Training (ECART) is a clinical-research integration approach developed by an orthopaedic team at the Second Hospital of Shandong University. Methods: We conducted a theory-informed, interpretivist qualitative single-case study. The case was an orthopaedic clinical-research team at the Second Hospital of Shandong University. Participants included medical undergraduates, academic degree graduate students, professional degree graduate students, clinical teachers, and research platform leads. We used purposive sampling with maximum variation. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and de-identified teaching documents. Data were analysed using the framework method and were interpreted with a Context-Activity-Mechanism-Outcome (CAMO) logic. Results: The analysis showed that ECART was not simply early entry into the clinic or early entry into the laboratory. It was a team-based learning process centred on real medical problems. Four themes were identified. First, early clinical exposure helped learners make real problems visible and nameable, rather than merely increasing exposure. Second, clinical-research connection followed different pathways. Professional degree graduate students often started from clinical uncertainties in residency training and case management, and moved toward evidence-informed small projects. Academic degree graduate students often started from literature gaps, experimental findings, and mechanistic hypotheses, and then used clinical feedback to calibrate meaning. Third, research training, through literature reading, group meetings, experimental design, data review, and mentor questioning, helped learners move from completing tasks to explaining problems. Fourth, sustained ECART depended on a tiered team ecology formed by clinical teachers, research mentors, research platforms, and senior peers. Based on these findings, we refined the ECART programme theory: real medical problems are translated through explanation, searching, experimentalisation, and feedback-based reinterpretation into research questions that learners can understand, discuss, and test. This process supports problem formation, evidence awareness, mechanistic reasoning, translational judgement, and career clarification. Conclusion: ECART is best understood as a clinical-research integrated learning ecology that emerges from real team practice, rather than as a fixed standardised course. Its educational value lies in a recurring cycle of real problems, research translation, multi-source feedback, and clinical reinterpretation. This framework may inform the design, evaluation, and contextual adaptation of clinical-research integration pathways in medical education.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20077

The Hidden Evolution of Disguised Visual Context inside the VLM

Authors:

Wish Suharitdamrong↗Tony Alex↗Muhammad Awais↗Sara Atito↗

arXiv:2606.20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals. How they are transformed into meaningful representations and interact with the language space depends entirely on the integration architecture. Whether by treating visual tokens as in-context prompts within the input sequence or injecting them directly into the LLM's intermediate layers. A controlled comparison and understanding of how these architectural choices affect visual information and its internal transformation to integrate with the LLM remains underexplored. We provide a fair comparison by evaluating in-context and layer-wise injection VLM integration paradigms under identical training conditions across single image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. In doing so, we uncover a hidden evolution where visual tokens enter the LLM as disguised visual context, raw representations lacking linguistic structure, but are progressively reshaped depending on the integration paradigm, each capturing fundamentally different frequency characteristics of the visual signal. We show that this evolution inside the LLM determines what visual features the VLM can utilize effectively, how visual representations align with the language space, and ultimately how each paradigm performs across different tasks. We further demonstrate that attention allocation alone is insufficient, and that performance is driven by the quality of visual representations at each layer.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12423

The Challenges of Balancing AI Compliance and Technological Innovations in Critical Sectors: A Systematic Literature Review

Authors:

Ayush Enkhtaivan↗Chinazunwa Uwaoma↗

arXiv:2606.12423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into critical infrastructure including healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, offers transformative benefits but also conflicts with evolving regulatory and governance frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to examine the challenges of balancing AI compliance and technological innovation across critical infrastructure sectors. The review follows established SLR guidelines to extract and synthesize insights from peer-reviewed articles, report, and institutional sources published between 2020-2025. The study identifies three interrelated challenges: fragmented regulations, excessive compliance burdens for smaller to medium enterprises (SMEs), and misaligned governance models. To address these challenges, the study highlights practical governance strategies, including risk-tiered regulation, compliance by design, and explainable AI, to support scalable and trustworthy AI deployment in critical sectors. Key contributions include a concise mapping of core AI-governance challenges and a conceptual diagram illustrating their overlap, as well as actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioner to harmonize oversight with innovation.

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19.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:c1276d7a0b17286fd0baecd24ab5b91d

Author Correction: Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus

Authors:

Kalman A. Katlowitz↗

No abstract for this item (typically a correction, editorial or news piece — the publisher provides none)

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13633

Aerial Wildfire Suppression Planning with a Hybrid CNN-Cellular Automata Fire Model

Authors:

Ion Matei↗Maksym Zhenirovskyy↗Takuya Kurihana↗Rohit Vupala↗Anthony Wong↗

arXiv:2606.13633v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aerial wildfire suppression requires not only predicting fire spread, but also designing effective intervention strategies under operational and environmental uncertainty. We present a modeling and optimization framework for aerial wildfire suppression that combines a hybrid neural-cellular automaton wildfire model with gradient-based design of targeted aerial drops. The wildfire model predicts spatially varying spread behavior from terrain, fuel, and wind data, while the intervention module determines binary drop actions with continuous-valued location and orientation parameters mapped to the simulation grid. Water and retardant are represented with distinct suppression effects, corresponding to immediate reduction of active burning and persistent reduction of future spread. To evaluate the robustness of the resulting suppression plans, we quantify both aleatoric uncertainty through Monte Carlo sampling of daily fire-state realizations and epistemic uncertainty through spatially correlated prediction-error perturbations. A case study based on the 2020 Bear Fire shows that the framework can generate coherent aerial suppression schedules for reducing total fire-affected area and can support uncertainty-aware analysis of wildfire intervention strategies.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17220

When Rules Learn: A Self-Evolving Agent for Legal Case Retrieval

Authors:

Mingxu Tao↗Jiawei Hu↗Xian Zhou↗Wenpeng Hu↗Jiajun Cheng↗Yunbo Cao↗Zhunchen Luo↗Guotong Geng↗

arXiv:2606.17220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal case retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of legal language and the need for precise lexical alignment between queries and relevant cases. Although dense retrieval models have achieved notable progress, empirical studies show that BM25 continues to serve as a strong baseline in this domain. It motivates us to propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. The framework equips an LLM-based agent with an automatic evaluation environment, enabling it to iteratively create rewriting rules, plan validation experiments over rule combinations, and eliminate ineffective rules based on historical feedbacks. We evaluate our method on the Chinese legal case retrieval benchmark LeCaRD-v2. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, particularly when powered by a highcapacity core LLM. We also conduct detailed analyses to investigate the mechanisms underlying self-evolution. Our findings reveal that LLM's capabilities to leverage previous experimental results and its intrinsic knowledge of rule elimination play critical roles in refining the rule set via self-evolution.

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22.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15344

Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates

Authors:

Yuan Wang↗Marcin Muszynski↗Avinash Dash↗Rishabh Kaurav↗Vinod M. Menon↗Oleksandr Kyriienko↗

arXiv:2606.15344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.

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23.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14204

Simultaneous Estimation of Partial-Transpose Moments with Active Memory Independent of the Moment Order

Authors:

Junxiang Huang↗Xiaoyang Wang↗Xiao Yuan↗Yukun Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.14204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the simultaneous estimation of partial-transpose moments $p_j(\rho_{AB})=\mathrm{Tr}[(\rho_{AB}^{T_B})^j]$, $j=2,\ldots,K$, of an unknown bipartite $n$-qubit state from independent copies under an explicit active-memory constraint. We give a sequential qubit-reuse realization of the partial-transpose permutation that uses at most $2n+1$ active qubits, independent of $K$, and estimates all moments $p_2,\ldots,p_K$ to uniform additive error $\epsilon$ with total copy complexity $O(K\log K/\epsilon^2)$. We also prove two converse bounds. First, any uniformly accurate simultaneous estimator requires $\Omega(K/\epsilon^2)$ copies in the worst case. Second, the same scaling holds on an explicit isospectral two-qubit negative-partial-transpose (NPT) family whose ordinary moments are constant while the partial-transpose moments vary. These results characterize the copy complexity of the partial-transpose moment hierarchy up to a logarithmic factor and extend simultaneous nonlinear-functional estimation from ordinary state powers to partial-transpose spectral data under active quantum memory independent of the target moment order.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2506.03453

Permutation-Invariant N-body gates via Tavis-Cummings Hamiltonian

Authors:

Plato Deliyannis↗Iman Marvian↗

arXiv:2506.03453v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Global control provides a promising route to implementing multi-qubit gates without individual qubit addressing. This is especially appealing for permutation-invariant (PI) gates, whose symmetry is often broken when they are compiled into individually addressed one- and two-qubit gates. Important examples include SWAP, $\sqrt{iSWAP}$, and the n-qubit controlled-Z gate, which is equivalent, up to two single-qubit Hadamard gates, to the multi-qubit Toffoli gate. Motivated by this global-control perspective, we show that all PI unitaries on an arbitrary number of qubits can be realized using the Tavis-Cummings (TC) interaction, the multi-qubit version of the Jaynes-Cummings interaction, together with global uniform z and x fields. Here, the $n$ qubits are identically coupled to a single bosonic mode (oscillator), which is initialized in and returned to its vacuum state. A corollary is that all PI states, including GHZ and Dicke states, can be prepared using the same global control. For the case n=2 qubits, which is particularly important in quantum computing, we also find explicit pulse sequences for implementing all PI qubit unitaries that conserve angular momentum in the z direction, using only the TC interaction and global z fields. This includes controlled-Z, SWAP, and $\sqrt{iSWAP}$.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17331

Decision-Driven Geosteering Under Uncertainty: A Unified Framework for Sequential Decision Optimization

Authors:

Hibat Errahmen Djecta↗Sergey Alyaev↗Kristian Fossum↗Reidar B. Bratvold↗Ressi Bonti Muhammad↗Apoorv Srivastava↗

arXiv:2606.17331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geosteering requires navigating a well trajectory through an unknown geological configuration, while sequentially updating decisions based on indirect measurements acquired during drilling. This work presents an uncertainty-aware geosteering framework that tightly integrates particle filtering for probabilistic subsurface interpretation with value-based reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. Geological uncertainty ahead of the drill bit is represented explicitly through a particle filter (PF), enabling belief-informed control rather than deterministic trajectory correction. The framework couples PF belief updates with belief-informed decision policies and evaluates three decision-making options that operate under identical uncertainty representations: an interpretable Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) scheme, a Deep Q-learning baseline, and a Dual Deep Reinforcement Learning (Dual DRL) architecture trained with a target Q-network scheme for stability, using a dueling (value/advantage) decomposition for Q-value parameterization. Beyond final placement performance, we assess policy behavior using stability-oriented metrics that quantify steering smoothness over time, providing additional operational insight into how decision policies respond as uncertainty evolves. The framework is integrated with an API for validation within an industrial geosteering simulator under realistic measurement noise and drilling constraints. Using identical geological realizations, operational limits, and reward definitions across methods, the experiments provide a controlled and high-fidelity evaluation of how alternative decision policies behave throughout the drilling process, rather than evaluating performance solely from the final well trajectory.

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