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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Arrival times of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.20281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The times of flight of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate are theoretically investigated in the experimentally unexplored regime corresponding to detection close to the trap of the condensate. In this regime, there is no consensus on how to calculate the distribution of times of arrival onto the detector. For non-interacting particles, distinct theoretical predictions have been made in the past. This work analyses how these predictions are modified for an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate. For this purpose, a time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation is solved analytically and numerically.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Urinary Creatine Riboside Complements PSA to Improve Disease Detection in the Diagnostic Gray Zone of Prostate Cancer

Circulating prostate-specific antigen (PSA) discriminates poorly in the diagnostic gray zone (3.0-9.99 ng/mL), where ~75% of biopsies yield no clinically significant prostate cancer (PCa). We evaluated whether urinary creatine riboside (CR), a tumor-derived metabolite excreted through the prostatic urethra, complements PSA for gray-zone detection and independently predicts prostate-cancer-specific mortality (PCSM). In the NCI-Maryland PCa Case-Control Study (951 cases, 962 controls; 47.6% African American men; median follow-up 11.5 years), urinary CR was quantified by UPLC-MS/MS. Within the PSA gray zone (n = 668), urinary CR was complementary to PSA, with markedly higher single-marker discrimination than PSA (AUC 0.93, 95% CI 0.88-0.98 vs 0.77, 0.66-0.89) and additive when combined ({Delta}AUC +0.17, p < 0.001; 91.4% sensitivity at 80% specificity). After adjustment for 11 clinical and sociodemographic covariates, urinary CR independently predicted PCSM complementary to PSA (Fine-Gray SHR 1.72, 1.35-2.19 for CR; 1.35, 1.08-1.68 for PSA; Harrell's C 0.85 for CR + PSA vs 0.77 for PSA alone), with strongest signal in African American men (SHR 2.43, 1.57-3.75 for CR). We conclude that urinary CR is a candidate non-invasive biomarker complementary to PSA - improving gray-zone triage and predicting PCSM; prospective validation in biopsy-referred cohorts is warranted.

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

FrameOracle: Learning What to See and How Much to See in Videos

Vision-language models (VLMs) advance video understanding but operate under tight computational budgets, making performance dependent on selecting a small, high-quality subset of frames. Existing frame sampling strategies, such as uniform or fixed-budget selection, fail to adapt to variations in content density or task complexity. To address this, we present FrameOracle, a lightweight, plug-and-play module that predicts both (1) which frames are most relevant to a given query and (2) how many frames are needed. FrameOracle is trained via a curriculum that progresses from weak proxy signals, such as cross-modal similarity, to stronger supervision with FrameOracle-41K, the first large-scale VideoQA dataset with validated keyframe annotations specifying minimal sufficient frames per question. Extensive experiments across five VLMs and six benchmarks show that FrameOracle reduces 16-frame inputs to an average of 10.4 frames without accuracy loss. When starting from 64-frame candidates, it reduces inputs to 13.9 frames on average while improving accuracy by 1.5%, achieving state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy trade-offs for scalable video understanding.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

SpAArSIST: Sparsified AASIST for Efficient and Reliable Anti-Spoofing

arXiv:2606.11674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SpAArSIST, a deployment-oriented refinement of the widely used AASIST graph pooling backend for self-supervised learning (SSL) based anti-spoofing. Motivated by redundant operations in public implementations, we replace learned pooling and stack-node attention with explicit, lightweight choices: separate train and inference graph pooling ratios $(k_{\mathrm{tr}},k_{\mathrm{inf}})$, magnitude-based node scoring, and mean aggregation of graph nodes. The best overall configuration (rank 1) cuts backend compute by 20.7% (195.045M $\rightarrow$ 154.706M MACs) and model size by 4.1% (611.8k $\rightarrow$ 586.4k params), while improving out-of-domain robustness on In-the-Wild to 2.82% EER and 0.078 minDCF (from 4.64% and 0.133) and remaining competitive on ASVspoof5. We further provide a composite selection score that summarizes accuracy, calibration, and compute to support balanced deployment-oriented model choice.

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

Systematic Construction of Time-Dependent Hamiltonians for Microwave-Driven Josephson Circuits

arXiv:2512.20743v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-dependent electromagnetic drives are fundamental for controlling complex quantum systems, including superconducting Josephson circuits. In these devices, accurate time-dependent Hamiltonian models are imperative for predicting their dynamics and designing high-fidelity quantum operations. Existing numerical methods, such as black-box quantization (BBQ) and energy-participation ratio (EPR), excel at modeling the static Hamiltonians of Josephson circuits. However, these techniques do not fully capture the behavior of driven circuits stimulated by external microwave drives, nor do they include a generalized approach to account for the inevitable noise and dissipation that enter through microwave ports. Here, we introduce numerical techniques that leverage classical microwave simulations, efficiently executable in finite-element solvers, to obtain the time-dependent Hamiltonian of microwave-driven superconducting circuits with arbitrary geometries under charge, flux, or mixed electromagnetic modulation. Importantly, our techniques do not rely on a lumped-element description of the superconducting circuit, in contrast to previous approaches to tackling this problem. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by characterizing the driven properties of realistic circuit devices in complex electromagnetic environments, including coherent dynamics due to charge and flux modulation, as well as drive-induced relaxation and dephasing. Our techniques offer a powerful toolbox for optimizing circuit designs and advancing practical applications in superconducting quantum computing.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

When the Next Step Is Not One Step: Distribution-Aware Execution Modeling for Concurrent Go Programs

arXiv:2606.17508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training a model to predict the next step in a concurrent program is harder than it looks: two runs of the same program from the same trace prefix can produce different next events, both valid, because the scheduler is nondeterministic. A model trained against a single label is learning to guess one outcome of a random process. We turn this around and use the nondeterminism as a training signal. We run each program many times, aggregate the observed next events into an empirical distribution, and fine-tune a 7B model to match that distribution with a KL objective. On 798 held-out predictions drawn from real production Go bugs (CockroachDB, Kubernetes, gRPC, etcd), fine-tuning on fewer than a thousand traces reaches 36.2% accuracy, ahead of Gemini 3.5 Flash used zero-shot (34.8%) and the same model without fine-tuning (28.6%). Distribution training matches cross-entropy on accuracy (35.8% vs. 36.2%) while reducing Expected Calibration Error from 0.205 to 0.169. We also derive a formal goroutine-leak signature for a class of select-blocked goroutines where P(GoUnblock)=0 holds by scheduler semantics, not by learning. We release the dataset, trained adapters, and all tooling.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Jacobian Scopes: token-level causal attributions in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) make next-token predictions based on clues present in their context, such as semantic descriptions and in-context examples. Yet, elucidating which prior tokens most strongly influence a given prediction remains challenging due to the proliferation of layers and attention heads in modern architectures. We propose Jacobian Scopes, a suite of gradient-based, token-level causal attribution methods for interpreting LLM predictions. Grounded in perturbation theory and information geometry, Jacobian Scopes quantify how input tokens influence various aspects of a model's prediction, such as specific logits, the full predictive distribution, and model uncertainty (effective temperature). Through case studies spanning instruction understanding, translation, and in-context learning (ICL), we demonstrate how Jacobian Scopes reveal implicit political biases, uncover word- and phrase-level translation strategies, and shed light on recently debated mechanisms underlying in-context time-series forecasting. To facilitate exploration of Jacobian Scopes on custom text, we open-source our implementations and provide a cloud-hosted interactive demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Typony/JacobianScopes.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Offline Diffusion Policy for Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling

arXiv:2501.12942v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective multi-user delay-constrained scheduling is crucial in various real-world applications, including embodied AI, instant messaging, live streaming, and data center management, where efficient resource allocation is required among users with diverse delay sensitivities. In these scenarios, schedulers must make real-time decisions to satisfy both delay and resource constraints without prior knowledge of system dynamics, which are often time-varying and challenging to estimate. {Current learning-based methods typically require online interactions with actual systems during the training stage. Therefore, these approaches are often difficult or impractical, as they can significantly degrade system performance and incur substantial service costs.} To address these challenges, we propose a novel offline reinforcement learning-based algorithm, named \underline{S}cheduling By \underline{O}ffline Learning with \underline{C}ritic Guidance and \underline{D}iffusion Model (SOCD), to learn efficient scheduling policies purely from pre-collected offline data. SOCD innovatively employs a diffusion policy, complemented by a sampling-free critic network for policy guidance. By integrating the Lagrangian multiplier optimization into the offline reinforcement learning, SOCD efficiently trains high-quality constraint-aware policies exclusively from available datasets, eliminating the need for online interactions with the system. Experimental results demonstrate that SOCD is resilient to various system dynamics, including partially observable and large-scale environments, and delivers superior performance compared to existing methods.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Matrix-product state skeletons in Onsager-integrable quantum chains

arXiv:2511.07212v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Matrix-product state (MPS) skeletons are connected networks of Hamiltonians with exact MPS ground states that underlie a phase diagram. Such skeletons have previously been found in classes of free-fermion models. For the translation-invariant BDI and AIII free-fermion classes, it has been shown that the underlying skeleton is dense, giving an analytic approach to MPS approximation of ground states anywhere in the class. In this paper, we partially expose the skeleton in certain interacting spin chains: the $N$-state Onsager-integrable chiral clock families. We construct MPS that form a dense MPS skeleton in the gapped regions surrounding a sequence of fixed-point Hamiltonians (the generators of the Onsager algebra). Outside these gapped regions, these MPS remain eigenstates, but no longer give the many-body ground state. Rather, they are ground states in particular sectors of the spectrum. Our methods also allow us to find further MPS eigenstates; these correspond to low-lying excited states within the aforementioned gapped regions. This set of MPS excited states goes beyond the previous analysis of ground states on the $N=2$ free-fermion MPS skeleton. As an application of our results, we find a closed form for the disorder parameter in a family of interacting models. Finally, we remark that many of our results use only the Onsager algebra and are not specific to the chiral clock model representation.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

First to reach $n$ game

arXiv:2506.08782v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and type 2). At each round, we randomly pick a ball from the urn, and its type determines which of the two players wins. We study the game under three regimes. In the first and the third regimes, a ball is taken without replacement, whilst in the second regime, it is returned to the urn with one more ball of the same colour. We study the properties of the random variables equal to the properly defined overall net profits of the players, and the results are drastically different in all three regimes.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

GLLaucoMed: A Secure LLM-Powered Agentic Workflow for Automated Medication Extraction from Free-Text Glaucoma Clinical Notes

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in extracting medication-related information from glaucoma clinical notes in the electronic health record (EHR). Design: Cross-sectional. Subjects: 1,250 subjects in the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Methods: Extracted clinical notes from glaucoma-related encounters between 2014 and 2024 were labeled by two glaucoma specialists with a third serving as an adjudicator. Graders were asked to label current topical medications (CTM), proposed changes to topical medications ({Delta}TM), current oral medications (COM), and proposed changes to oral medications ({Delta}OM) in a structured fashion. The dataset was split into development (10%), validation (10%), and test (80%) sets stratified by clinician. Development and validation sets were used to engineer and refine prompts, and the held-out test set was used for model assessment. Five LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek-V3.2, GPT 5.2, Grok 4.1, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) were accessed via Microsoft Azure AI Foundry within a HIPAA-compliant environment. Inter-grader agreement was assessed with Gwet AC1. LLM performance was initially assessed in a binary fashion with F1 scores, and the degree of text match among positive cases was evaluated using exact match accuracy and Jaccard Index (JI). Main Outcome Measures: F1 score, exact match accuracy, JI. Results: Gwet AC1 for intergrader agreement was 0.799, 0.888, 0.985, and 0.988 for CTM, {Delta}TM, COM, and {Delta}OM, respectively. F1 scores for CTM were 0.985, 0.971, 0.978, 0.968, and 0.970 for Claude, Deepseek, GPT, Grok, and Qwen, respectively; for {Delta}TM: 0.905, 0.826, 0.897, 0.842, 0.855, respectively; for COM: 0.923, 0.887, 0.899, 0.906, 0.894, respectively; for {Delta}OM: 0.958, 0.815, 0.937, 0.835, 0.940, respectively. Among positive cases, range of exact match accuracies for CTM (N=1354) was 0.730- 0.882 and range of JIs was 0.809-0.918. For {Delta}TM (N=404), exact match accuracy range was 0.619-0.780 and JI range was 0.668-0.827. For COM (N=47), exact match accuracy range was 0.766-0.872 and JI range was 0.765-0.870. For {Delta}OM (N=25), exact match accuracy range was 0.583-0.920 and JI range was 0.583-0.922. Conclusions: The GLLaucoMed pipeline demonstrated high performance in extracting and standardizing medication data from unstructured clinical notes, including both current medications and proposed changes. Claude and GPT exhibited the strongest performance.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ACC: Compiling Agent Trajectories for Long-Context Training

Recent development of agents has renewed demand for long-context reasoning capacity of LLMs. However, training LLMs for this capacity requires costly long-document curation or heuristic context synthesis. We observe that agents produce massive trajectories when solving problems, invoking tools and receiving environment observations across many turns. The evidence needed to answer the original question is thus scattered throughout these turns, requiring integration of distant context segments. Nevertheless, standard agent SFT masks tool responses and only trains turn-level tool selection, creating a supervision blind spot where these scattered signals go unused. We propose Agent Context Compilation (ACC), which converts trajectories from search, software engineering, and database querying agents into long-context QA pairs that combine the original question with tool responses and environment observations gathered across multiple turns, training the model to answer directly without tool use. This makes the dependencies between the question and the evidence explicit, enabling direct supervision of long-context reasoning over distant segments without additional annotation. ACC is a simple but effective approach that can be combined with any existing long-context extension or training method, providing scalable supervised fine-tuning data. We validate ACC on long-range dependency modeling tasks through MRCR and GraphWalks, challenging benchmarks requiring cross-turn coreference resolution and graph traversal over extended contexts. Training Qwen3-30B-A3B with ACC achieves 68.3 on MRCR (+18.1) and 77.5 on GraphWalks (+7.6), results comparable to Qwen3-235B-A22B, while preserving general capabilities on GPQA, MMLU-Pro, AIME, and IFEval. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the ACC-trained model exhibits task-adaptive attention restructuring and expert specialization.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Simulation of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with Bivariate Quantum Signal Processing

arXiv:2605.12450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We achieve query-optimal quantum simulations of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians $H_{\mathrm{eff}} = H_R + iH_I$, where $H_R$ is Hermitian and $H_I \succeq 0$, using a bivariate extension of quantum signal processing (QSP) with non-commuting signal operators. The algorithm encodes the interaction-picture Dyson series as a polynomial on the bitorus, implemented through a structured multivariable QSP (M-QSP) circuit. A constant-ratio condition guarantees scalar angle-finding for M-QSP circuits with arbitrary non-commuting signal operators. A degree-preserving sum-of-squares spectral factorization permits scalar complementary polynomials in two variables. Angles are deterministically calculated in a classical precomputation step, running in $\mathcal{O}(d_R \cdot d_I)$ classical operations. Operator norms $\alpha_R\,,\beta_I$ contribute additively with query complexity $\mathcal{O}((\alpha_R + \beta_I)T + \log(1/\varepsilon)/\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ matching an information-theoretic lower bound in the separate-oracle model, where $H_R$ and $H_I$ are accessed through independent block encodings. The postselection success probability is $e^{-2\beta_I T}\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2\cdot (1 - \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon))$, decomposing into a state-dependent factor $\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2$ from the intrinsic barrier and an $e^{-2\beta_I T}$ overhead from polynomial block-encoding.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

AMaNITA: an end-to-end workflow for native tRNA nanopore sequencing data analysis

Transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules serve as essential adapters during protein translation. While direct RNA sequencing (DRS) via Oxford Nanopore Technologies has emerged as a powerful platform for systematic tRNAome profiling, we currently lack a simple and robust statistical framework for nanopore tRNA data analyses. Here, we address this gap by developing AMaNITA (Abundance, Modifications, and Nanopore Intensity Toolbox Application), an end-to-end bioinformatic workflow that enables simplified, robust, and scalable analyses of nanopore native tRNA sequencing datasets. AMaNITA streamlines the entire analytical trajectory: from upstream processing (basecalling, mapping, filtering, batch effect correction) to downstream assessment of differential tRNA abundance and modification stoichiometry. The workflow generates an interactive HTML report for data exploration and analysis, allowing the user to download the source data files and resulting plots. AMaNITA can be executed using Singularity from the command line, without requiring installation of dependencies.

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

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

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

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Position: AI Must Become Planet-Centered, Not Just Human-Centered

arXiv:2606.13704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This position paper argues that contemporary AI paradigms are insufficient for supporting complex global goals and introduces Planet-Centered AI (PCAI) as a design philosophy and research agenda that reorients AI toward planetary-scale socio-ecological systems and their long-term trajectories. A planet-centered approach is grounded in systems thinking, treating Earth as an interconnected whole of which humans are part. We diagnose recurring limitations across AI frameworks, many of which remain human-centered, and show why these become especially consequential under current planetary conditions characterized by systemic risk, non-stationarity, and deep uncertainty. We then articulate how PCAI reshapes the AI lifecycle, from problem formulation and model design to evaluation and deployment, by emphasizing alignment with global agendas, developing system-aware AI foundations, trajectory-oriented evaluation, and monitorability. Finally, we advance a falsifiable claim: AI systems optimized without explicit consideration of systemic consequences are more likely to exacerbate systemic instability than to mitigate it.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Feature-Aligned Speech Watermarking for Robustness to Reconstruction Distortions

arXiv:2606.11828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio watermarking aims to embed identifiable information into audio while remaining imperceptible. Existing methods adopt high-fidelity, low-energy designs to preserve perceptual quality, but the resulting watermarks lack robustness under suppression by speech reconstruction models. Improving robustness is challenging due to the inherent robustness-fidelity trade-off in existing designs, where increasing watermark energy improves robustness but reduces fidelity. To address this problem, we propose a feature-aligned watermarking method that aligns the watermark with the original speech feature distribution, allowing higher watermark energy to improve robustness while preserving imperceptibility. We use a pretrained speech codec to generate a pseudo-speech watermark and fuse it into the spectrogram of the input audio, with VAD loss and perceptual losses guiding embedding within voiced regions. Experiments show that our method maintains imperceptibility comparable to existing approaches while substantially improving robustness under both seen and unseen speech reconstruction models.

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

Online Distributional Prediction via Latent Cluster Geometry Under Drift and Corruption

arXiv:2606.18778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online learning in non-stationary streams is often formulated as tracking a point estimate, but many applications require predicting the full data-generating distribution. We study online distributional prediction under drift and adversarial corruption. Our approach represents each candidate law through a latent cluster geometry: a variable-size configuration of centers that organizes probability mass and induces a predictive distribution. A Gibbs quasi-posterior over these configurations yields an online predictor by posterior averaging, and the resulting variable-dimensional posterior can be sampled with reversible-jump MCMC. The method therefore avoids specifying a parametric streaming law while retaining a structured latent space for uncertainty, regularization, and comparison. We evaluate performance by cumulative Wasserstein-1 regret against the time-varying true law. The analysis separates two effects: corruption perturbs the loss-based posterior update, whereas drift makes long-horizon posterior memory stale. We address the latter with a restarted variant that temporally localizes the same quasi-Bayesian update. The resulting high-probability bounds decompose into a PAC-Bayesian complexity term, a corruption-sensitive posterior perturbation term, and a dynamic optimal-transport term driven by \(A_T^{\mathrm{OT}}=\sum_{t=2}^T W_2^2(p_{t-1}^*,p_t^*)\). Under bounded support, stable latent geometry, predictive-map regularity, oracle realizability, localized restart windows, sublinear transport action, and sublinear corruption budget, the restarted predictor achieves sublinear cumulative Wasserstein regret. These guarantees require no parametric model for the stream, drift mechanism, or corruption process.

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

Robust Transformer-Based One-Step Stock Index Forecasting via Shifted Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.15701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers have shown remarkable success in sequence modeling, yet their direct application to financial time series remains challenging due to noisy signals, short-memory dynamics, and distributional shifts. This paper proposes a modified Transformer architecture for one-step stock index forecasting, combined with advanced learning-rate scheduling and a novel Shifted Data Augmentation (SDA) technique. We evaluate the proposed framework on two benchmark stock index datasets, VN30 and S&P 500. Experimental results demonstrate that cosine annealing with warmup consistently improves forecasting accuracy over the generalized inverse-power scheduler. Furthermore, SDA substantially reduces forecasting errors and run-to-run variability while improving robustness to hyperparameter selection. The combination of cosine annealing scheduling and SDA achieved the best performance on both datasets, indicating that data augmentation can play a more important role than increasing model complexity in Transformer-based financial forecasting. These findings provide a practical and computationally efficient approach for robust stock index forecasting in noisy financial environments.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A multistate model of frailty progression after severe infections in adults >=65 years in England: a matched-cohort study

Background Evidence on frailty progression following severe infections is limited. We compared rates of transition to greater frailty or death between adults with and without severe infection in England. Methods We conducted a matched-cohort study among adults aged [&ge;]65 years (1,452,117: median age 76 years, 45% male) in Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum (2006-2019). Adults with severe infection (hospitalised primarily due to infection) were matched on calendar time to individuals without severe infection on age, sex, and primary care practice. The admission date was used as index date and same was assigned to matched unexposed adults. We measured frailty using Electronic Frailty Index, a proportion of 36 health deficits in validated categories (Fit 0-0.12, Mild >0.12-0.24, Moderate >0.24-0.36, Severe >0.36). In a time-varying Markov multistate model, we focused on forward transitions from baseline or intermediate frailty states to higher states or death. For each transition, we used Cox regression to estimate cause-specific transition hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs), comparing adults with and without severe infection. We adjusted for baseline frailty score, age, sex, deprivation, harmful alcohol use, smoking, and primary care infection history 5 years before index date. We estimated state occupancy probabilities, and expected length of stay (ELOS) in each state at year five among adults with and without severe infection. We explored effect modification by infection type. Results Across all transitions, severe infection was associated with higher adjusted hazards of transitioning to worsening frailty or death, HR, 95% CI: (fit to: mild[1.56, 1.54-1.58], moderate[2.51, 1.79-3.51], death[4.57, 4.50-4.65]; mild to: moderate[1.52, 1.50-1.53], severe[1.90, 1.43-2.52], death[2.67, 2.64-2.70]; moderate to: severe[1.40, 1.38-1.42], death[1.87, 1.85-1.90]; severe to death[1.48, 1.46-1.50]). Transition hazard ratios were strongest for lower respiratory tract infections, followed by sepsis, urinary tract infections, meningitis/encephalitis, gastroenteritis, and skin and soft tissue infections. At five years, adults with severe infection had higher probabilities of transitioning to greater frailty or death across all transitions and lower ELOS in each frailty state than those without severe infection. Interpretation Severe infections may accelerate frailty deterioration in older age. Prevention through vaccination, early detection, and prompt management may help mitigate this decline.

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PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29

Availability, appeal, and addictiveness by design: Tobacco and nicotine industry deliberate targeting of youth

by Raglan Maddox, Becky Freeman, Charlotta Pisinger, Emily Banks Contemporary tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed, marketed, and distributed to maximize youth appeal, uptake, dependence, and use. Youth uptake is a predictable outcome of systems designed to maximize product availability, appeal, and addictiveness. In recognition of the World No Tobacco Day 2026 theme, "unmasking the appeal", this Perspective by Raglan Maddox and colleagues discusses how tobacco and nicotine products, particularly e-cigarettes, are deliberately designed and marketed to maximize youth appeal, and highlight the need for policies to ensure greater industry accountability and to tackle concerning uptake trends.