Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15650

AnonShield: Scalable On-Premise Pseudonymization for CSIRT Vulnerability Data

Authors:

Cristhian Kapelinski↗Douglas Lautert↗Beatriz Machado↗Diego Kreutz↗Isadora Garcia Ferr\~ao↗

arXiv:2606.15650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present AnonShield, a high-throughput, on-premise pseudonymization system that combines GPU-accelerated NER, streaming processing, caching, and schema-aware configuration. Evaluated on datasets up to 550 MB (70,951 records), AnonShield reduces processing time from over 92 hours to under 10 minutes (up to 738x speedup) while achieving up to 94.2% F1-score and 96.7% recall. Our results show that scalable pseudonymization of vulnerability data is feasible without sacrificing analytical utility, enabling compliant data sharing in operational CSIRT environments.

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02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13638

Optimal classical shadow estimation of unitary channels at Heisenberg limit

Authors:

Entong He↗Zihao Li↗Noam Scully↗Sisi Zhou↗Yuxiang Yang↗

arXiv:2606.13638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full tomography of an unknown quantum evolution is resource-intensive and often unnecessary when the goal is only to predict selected properties. This motivates the study of classical shadow estimation of unitary channels (CSEU), a task in which one queries an unknown $d$-dimensional unitary $U$ and stores classical data that can later be used to predict expectation values $\mathrm{tr}[O \cdot U\rho U^\dagger]$ up to additive error $\varepsilon$ for arbitrary input states $\rho$ and observables $O$. We propose a parallel, non-adaptive CSEU protocol using $\mathcal{O}(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ queries when the input states or observables have constant rank. This achieves Heisenberg scaling with respect to $\varepsilon$ and is query-optimal, as we prove a matching $\Omega(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ lower bound that remains valid even with stronger access to the unknown unitary. Our query-optimal CSEU protocol provides a versatile and powerful tool for quantum learning theory, pushing the performance limits of several fundamental learning tasks, including unitary channel tomography, Hamiltonian learning, boundary-regime quantum channel tomography, Pauli transfer matrix learning, inverse-free amplitude estimation, pure-state property estimation, and shallow-circuit learning. Remarkably, we show that optimal unitary channel tomography can be achieved using only parallel queries, closing the gap between the best achievable efficiency of parallel and sequential tomography protocols. Together, these applications establish our framework as a fundamental tool for learning properties of quantum processes, particularly for certain key tasks that require high precision.

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03.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:84ae281699f52b48aaec31f22d4fb0f9

Cross-sectional study of the association between depressive symptoms and attentional bias to emotional stimuli in patients with acute stroke: Study protocol

Authors:

Yamashita↗Takizawa↗Koizumi↗Hamaguchi↗

Post-stroke depression affects approximately 30% of patients after stroke and is associated with delayed recovery in activities of daily living, reduced rehabilitation effectiveness, and poorer quality of life. Attentional bias modification may provide a low-burden, nonpharmacological approach for patients in the acute phase of stroke. However, before such an intervention can be implemented in clinical practice, it is necessary to clarify whether attentional bias is present in patients with acute stroke and depressive symptoms, whether cognitive function influences the manifestation of this bias, and which task and stimulus formats are most appropriate for assessment. This multicenter, cross-sectional observational study will enroll patients with acute stroke between 7-30 days after stroke onset. Depressive symptoms will be assessed using the depression subscale of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Attentional bias will be measured under four task conditions based on the dot-probe task and the cue-target task, using face and word stimuli. Secondary assessments will include cognitive function, anxiety symptoms, activities of daily living, health-related quality of life, and clinical background variables. The aims of this study are to investigate the association between depressive symptoms and attentional bias in patients with acute stroke, compare attentional bias characteristics across task and stimulus types, and examine the potential influence of cognitive function on this association. The findings are expected to provide an empirical basis for designing future attentional bias modification protocols targeting post-stroke depression in the acute phase. This study has been registered with the UMIN Clinical Trials Registry (UMIN000059166).

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04.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:227591331f6e586c49667cfa653b85e3

Poly-Social Risk for Hypertension Among Black and Latina Women

Authors:

Belak↗James↗Auguste↗Rana↗Eweka↗De Moor↗Sarma↗Ensing↗Economy↗K. E↗Powe↗C. E↗…

Background: Hypertension is a leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor prominently influenced by health-related social needs (HRSN). Whether detailed information on HRSN can improve identification of hypertension among minoritized women is unknown. Methods: Black and Latina women aged 18-65 years completed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities Screening Tool, assessing 13 HRSN domains. Hypertension was ascertained by a validated EHR-based algorithm or self-report of hypertension. Logistic regression tested associations of HRSN with hypertension. LASSO regression with 10-fold cross-validation was used to derive a poly-social risk score in the training set (random 70%) and tested in the validation set (30%) against a sociodemographic model (age, race, income, education). Results: Among 1302 participants (mean [SD] age 40.1 [11.3] years, 70.4% Black, 44.3% Latina), higher cumulative burden of HRSN was associated with increased odds of hypertension (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] for each additional domain of HRSN: 1.07 [95% CI 1.01-1.14], P=0.02). Food insecurity (aOR 2.30 [1.37-3.87], P= 0.002), lapse in utilities (aOR 1.44 [1.04-1.96], P=0.02), poor concentration (aOR 1.57 [1.13-2.17], P=0.007), and social isolation (aOR 1.77 [1.14-2.73], P=0.01) were associated with hypertension. In the validation set, the poly-social risk score did not improve discrimination for hypertension vs. the sociodemographic model (AUC 0.76 [95% CI 0.71-0.81] vs. AUC 0.80 [0.75-0.85]). Conclusion: In this cross-sectional analysis of Black and Latina women, greater cumulative social disadvantage was associated with hypertension. While inclusion of HRSN did not improve hypertension prediction beyond conventional sociodemographic indices, findings may inform targeted interventions among minorities at cardiometabolic risk.

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05.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:57f5c75d29d8f40beb20ce338ce748df

Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of Prophylactic Vasopressors for Preventing Post-induction Hypotension in the Elderly: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis

Authors:

Zhang↗Wang↗Duan↗C. L↗Di↗Y. R↗

Background: Post-induction hypotension is a predictable haemodynamic hazard in older adults undergoing general anaesthesia. Prevention remains divided among volume optimisation, anaesthetic dose reduction, rescue treatment after hypotension occurs and proactive vasoactive support. Methods: We searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CENTRAL, CNKI, Wanfang and VIP from inception to 30 March 2026. Eligible studies were randomised trials of prophylactic vasoactive drugs given before, during or immediately after induction in older adults. The primary outcome was post-induction hypotension. Secondary outcomes were post-induction mean arterial pressure (MAP), systolic arterial pressure (SBP), heart rate (HR) and reported haemodynamic adverse events. Random-effects network meta-analysis was used, and confidence in network estimates was assessed using CINeMA principles. Results: Thirty-one trials including 2,821 participants were included in the revised network. Compared with placebo/control, all active agents favoured lower post-induction hypotension. The most favourable point estimates were observed for phenylephrine (odds ratio [OR] 0.17, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01 to 2.16) and metaraminol (OR 0.19, 95% CI 0.02 to 1.53), although both were imprecise. More precise reductions were observed for methoxamine (OR 0.23, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.43), norepinephrine (OR 0.25, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.47) and ephedrine (OR 0.34, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.63). Phenylephrine ranked highest for MAP support, norepinephrine ranked highest for SBP support, and ephedrine ranked highest for HR preservation. Global inconsistency was detected for SBP but not for hypotension incidence, MAP or HR, supporting cautious profile-based interpretation. Conclusions: Prophylactic vasopressor choice during induction should be guided by haemodynamic phenotype rather than ranking alone. In the revised network, active prophylaxis consistently favoured lower hypotension, but sparse nodes produced uncertainty. Norepinephrine retained a comparatively balanced profile when vasodilatory post-induction hypotension is anticipated, phenylephrine and related alpha-agonists provided stronger pressure support when HR and cardiac-output reserve are preserved, and ephedrine was most relevant when chronotropic support is desired. Keywords: general anaesthesia; induction; hypotension; norepinephrine; phenylephrine; ephedrine; network meta-analysis; older adults.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16211

Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework

Authors:

Xingyu Tan↗Shiyuan Liu↗Xiaoyang Wang↗Qing Liu↗Xiwei Xu↗Xin Yuan↗Liming Zhu↗Wenjie Zhang↗

Biomedical question answering (QA) increasingly requires reasoning over interacting entities, where supporting evidence is scattered across biomedical knowledge graphs, literature documents, and web-accessible resources. However, existing biomedical QA benchmarks mainly focus on exam-style knowledge, literature comprehension, or short-range multi-hop inference, leaving source-conditioned graph reasoning and evidence topology construction underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BioMedHop, a multi-source graph-grounded benchmark for evaluating biomedical reasoning over structured evidence topologies. BioMedHop contains 10,045 instances across KG, document, web, and hybrid evidence settings, covering shared-neighbor matching, intersection reasoning, path-based reasoning, and counting, with option-based, open-ended, and numeric count renderings. To support this benchmark, we further propose BioWeave, a source-aware reasoning framework that retrieves biomedical KG paths, gathers supporting clues from documents and web sources, assembles them into a unified evidence graph, and verifies answers through entity-level evidence support. Comprehensive experiments show that BioWeave achieves the best overall performance among compared methods on BioMedHop, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by 10.5% in the overall average. Moreover, BioWeave consistently improves different LLM backbones and enables smaller models, such as Qwen3-4B, to achieve reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.

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07.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:4adc642a6b5c2b9eaa9d82b3d5550031

Multi-platform reassessment of human mitochondrial DNA methylation reveals signals consistent with technical artifacts

Authors:

Basrai↗Bahcheli↗A. T↗Tan↗Zuzarte↗P. C↗Bevan↗Chan↗Ng↗Lam↗Arruda↗Das↗…

The existence and functional relevance of mitochondrial DNA methylation remain controversial. Here, we systematically profiled cytosine methylation and hydroxymethylation across human brain and blood tissues spanning healthy and malignant states using orthogonal sequencing approaches that avoid chemical conversion during library preparation. While nuclear DNA exhibited canonical methylation patterns, mitochondrial DNA consistently showed negligible signal, indistinguishable from background technical noise. By mapping cytosine-guanine sites between mitochondrial DNA and nuclear-embedded mitochondrial sequences, we demonstrate the potential of these nuclear counterparts to confound not only cytosine methylation but also hydroxymethylation measurements, corroborating and extending prior findings implicating nuclear contamination as a potential source of apparent mitochondrial epigenetic signals. Additional technical factors that inflate apparent mtDNA methylation signals were identified, including sequence context biases, flow cell chemistries, and coverage-dependent discrepancies between the heavy and light strands. Collectively, these results provide convergent evidence against the presence of biologically meaningful cytosine methylation or hydroxymethylation in mitochondrial DNA. These findings caution against interpreting apparent mtDNA methylation signals in human adult tissues as meaningful without rigorous orthogonal validation and comprehensive consideration of technical and analytical confounding factors.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14990

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

Authors:

Naiyu Yin↗Yue Yu↗

arXiv:2606.14990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.

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09.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11333

Observable signatures of exceptional points from left-right eigenstate distinction

Authors:

Leela Ganesh Chandra Lakkaraju↗Soumik Bandyopadhyay↗Sudipto Singha Roy↗Philipp Hauke↗

arXiv:2606.11333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Hermitian quantum systems exhibit qualitatively distinct physical behavior compared to Hermitian systems, a prime example being spectral singularities known as exceptional points. Their relevance in, e.g., quantum sensing, unidirectional transport, and robust lasing makes it important to be able to identify exceptional points through observable features of a many-body system. Here, using as an example a one-dimensional complex XY spin chain realizing both rotation-time RT- and parity-time PT-symmetric regimes, we develop a framework for detecting exceptional points based on the distinction between left and right eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian, which in a non-Hermitian system are no longer the adjoint of each other. We first show that a global measure constructed from the difference between the Hamiltonian and its adjoint locates exceptional points via distinct non-analytic behavior. At the level of observables, differences in local spin correlations evaluated on the right and left eigenstates provide a reliable static detection scheme. In contrast, static bipartite entanglement measures fail to capture this distinction, urging us to study the quantum dynamics of the model. Following a sudden quench, we demonstrate that the time-averaged right-left entanglement entropy difference directly encodes signatures of the exceptional point. In the RT-symmetric regime, it exhibits a pronounced peak at the exceptional point, whereas in the PT-symmetric regime it behaves as an order-parameter-like quantity, remaining finite in one phase and vanishing at the transition. Our results establish a direct link between the structure of non-Hermitian eigenstates and observable signatures of exceptional points, providing a practical route to identify them in existing quantum simulators.

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10.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2512.22219

MPK: A Compiler and Runtime for Mega-Kernelizing Tensor Programs

Authors:

Xinhao Cheng↗Zhihao Zhang↗Yu Zhou↗Jianan Ji↗Jinchen Jiang↗Zepeng Zhao↗Ziruo Xiao↗Zihao Ye↗Yingyi Huang↗Ruihang Lai↗Hongyi Jin↗Bohan Hou↗…

arXiv:2512.22219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Mirage Persistent Kernel (MPK), the first compiler and runtime system that automatically transforms multi-GPU model inference into a single high-performance mega-kernel. MPK introduces an SM-level graph representation that captures data dependencies at the granularity of individual streaming multiprocessors (SMs), enabling cross-operator software pipelining, \rev{fine-grained overlap of computation and communication, and other optimizations that are infeasible under the conventional kernel-per-operator execution model}. The MPK compiler lowers tensor programs into optimized SM-level task graphs and generates fast CUDA implementations for each task, while the MPK in-kernel parallel runtime executes these tasks within a single persistent mega-kernel using decentralized scheduling across SMs. Together, these components provide end-to-end kernel fusion with minimal developer effort, while preserving the flexibility of existing programming models. Our evaluation shows that MPK significantly outperforms existing kernel-per-operator LLM serving systems, achieving up to 1.7$\times$ lower end-to-end inference latency and pushing LLM inference performance close to the limits of the underlying hardware. MPK is publicly available at https://github.com/mirage-project/mirage.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2510.09905

The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs

Authors:

Xi Fang↗Weijie Xu↗Yuchong Zhang↗Stephanie Eckman↗Scott Nickleach↗Chandan K. Reddy↗

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human-validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user-independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion reasoning and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models' emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory-enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may reinforce social inequalities. To mitigate these disparities, we curate a general-purpose preference dataset designed to reduce demographic profiles' influence on emotional understanding.

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13754

D2H-AD: A Hybrid Model Utilizing Hyperdimensional Computing for Advanced Anomaly Detection

Authors:

Ghazal Ghajari↗Elaheh Ghajari↗Ashutosh Ghimire↗Saeid Ataei↗Faris Alsulami↗Fathi Amsaad↗

arXiv:2606.13754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anomaly detection is a fundamental component of intelligent systems with applications in healthcare, cybersecurity, smart grids, and IoT environments. Although conventional machine learning and deep learning methods have demonstrated effectiveness in identifying anomalies, they often rely on large labeled datasets, incur high computational costs, and face scalability challenges in edge and high-dimensional settings. This paper presents D2H-AD, a novel anomaly detection framework based on Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), a brain-inspired paradigm that represents information using high-dimensional distributed vectors. Unlike existing HDC-based methods, D2H-AD integrates distance-based similarity and density-aware encoding within a unified framework, improving anomaly representation and detection performance. Ablation studies show that hyperdimensional encoding alone yields up to 5.4% higher ROC-AUC than applying the same density-distance scoring directly in the original feature space. Furthermore, D2H-AD consistently outperforms five established baselines, namely HDAD, ODHD, One-Class SVM, Isolation Forest, and Autoencoders, across all evaluated datasets. The framework is lightweight, interpretable, and computationally efficient, making it suitable for resource-constrained and real-time applications. We validate D2H-AD on five benchmark datasets and demonstrate superior F1-score and ROC-AUC performance, together with robustness to class imbalance, noise, and data complexity. In addition to improved accuracy, D2H-AD offers scalability, a small memory footprint, and low-latency operation enabled by binary computations and a compact design. These properties make it particularly attractive for TinyML and edge AI deployments. The proposed framework highlights the potential of HDC for accurate, interpretable, and energy-efficient anomaly detection in dynamic environments.

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13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16916

Quantifying Coherence-to-Entanglement Conversion Efficiency under Noisy Operations

Authors:

Asad Ali↗H. Kuniyil↗M. I. Hussain↗M. T. Rahim↗Abdallah Slaoui↗Saif Al-Kuwari↗

arXiv:2606.16916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the noise-limited conversion of local quantum coherence into bipartite entanglement in a minimal two-qubit protocol comprising a coherent single-qubit input, an incoherent ancilla, an ideal CNOT operation, and subsequent environmental noise. Employing the $l_1$-norm of coherence and the entanglement negativity as resource quantifiers, we establish an exact closed-form correspondence between local single-qubit input coherence and the two-qubit entanglement generated in the noiseless limit, showing that the output negativity is precisely one half of the initial $l_1$-coherence. We then derive analytic expressions for the surviving entanglement and the associated coherence-to-entanglement conversion efficiency under two representative noise mechanisms: independent phase damping and global two-qubit depolarizing noise. The two channels exhibit qualitatively distinct degradation behavior. Phase damping induces a universal multiplicative suppression of the generated entanglement, yielding a coherence-independent conversion efficiency and no finite-noise entanglement sudden death. In contrast, global depolarization introduces an isotropic mixing contribution that shifts the partial-transpose spectrum, producing coherence-dependent degradation and a finite sudden-death threshold. We show that maximally coherent inputs not only maximize the entanglement generated by the CNOT protocol but also optimize its robustness against depolarizing noise. Direct density-matrix simulations validate the analytic results to numerical precision. These findings provide a compact analytic benchmark for assessing how different noise mechanisms constrain coherence-to-entanglement conversion in elementary quantum-information protocols and near-term quantum devices.

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14.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13504

A refined thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations

Authors:

Mohamed Boubakour↗Talia Szikman↗Cyril Elouard↗

arXiv:2606.13504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic thermodynamic analysis of nonsecular master equations. We consider master equations resulting either from the partial secular and the geometric-arithmetic approximations, two approximations ensuring the positivity of the system's dynamics when some of its transition frequencies are too small to enable the full secular approximation. Both cause the system to relax towards a steady state which is not the Gibbs state of its bare Hamiltonian. Nonetheless, we build a unified, consistent thermodynamic framework for those dynamics. Starting from a microscopic expression of the second law based on system-environment correlations, we employ a systematic perturbation theory to preserve the positivity of the second law despite the approximations done on the dynamics. We show that, in spite of the weak system-bath coupling, the system-bath interaction energy participates to the energy balance, as well as the Lamb-shift. Those extra contributions give rise to work performed by the system on the bath when the former is out of equilibrium. We compare this microscopic entropy production with the definition based on the contractivity of the reduced system dynamics (Spohn inequality). We show that, unlike for secular master equations, the two entropy production rates differ because of the presence of non-vanishing stationary coherences in the energy eigenbasis. However, in the case of a single thermal bath, the difference is purely transient, and no work can be cyclically extracted from the steady-state despite its non-Gibbs form. Finally, we illustrate our results with a simple example, clarifying and completing the thermodynamic picture of Markovian dynamics in the quantum regime.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11680

Organize then Retrieve: Hierarchical Memory Navigation for Efficient Agents

Authors:

Hao-Lun Hsu↗Nikki Lijing Kuang↗Boyi Liu↗Zhewei Yao↗Yuxiong He↗

Large language model (LLM) agents struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their inherent statelessness, requiring all task-relevant information to be encoded in growing input contexts. The resulting degraded reasoning quality, increased inference cost, and higher latency necessitate efficient working memory mechanisms. However, existing approaches either rely on lossy compression or similarity-based retrieval, which often fail to capture temporal structure and causal dependencies required for multi-step agentic tasks. In this work, we present HORMA, a Hierarchical Organize-and-Retrieve Memory Agent that organizes experience into a file-system-like hierarchical structure, where summarized entities are linked to the corresponding raw trajectories, enabling efficient access without losing detailed information. HORMA decomposes working memory into two stages: structured memory construction and navigation-based retrieval. The construction module iteratively refines how experiences are structured by distinguishing between failures caused by missing information and those caused by misleading or overloaded context. The navigation module retrieves task-relevant context by traversing the hierarchy using a lightweight agent trained with reinforcement learning to select minimal yet sufficient context, thereby reducing latency along the critical execution path. Across ALFWorld, LoCoMo, and LongMemEval, HORMA improves task performance under constrained context budgets while requiring at most 22.17% of the baseline token usage in long conversation tasks. Compared to existing methods, it consistently achieves better efficiency-performance trade-offs and generalizes effectively to unseen tasks.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11875

I Understand How You Feel: Enhancing Deeper Emotional Support Through Multilingual Emotional Validation in Dialogue System

Authors:

Zi Haur Pang↗Yahui Fu↗Koji Inoue↗Tatsuya Kawahara↗

Emotional validation - explicitly acknowledging that a user's feelings make sense - has proven therapeutic value but has received little computational attention. Emotional validation in dialogue systems can be decomposed into (i) validating response identification, (ii) validation timing detection, and (iii) validating response generation. To support research on all three subtasks, we release M-EDESConv, a 120k English-Japanese multilingual corpus created through hybrid manual and automatic annotation, and M-TESC, a multilingual spoken-dialogue test set. For timing detection, we propose MEGUMI, a Multilingual Emotion-aware Gated Unit for Mutual Integration, that fuses frozen XLM-RoBERTa semantics with language-specific emotion encoders via cross-modal attention and gated fusion. MEGUMI shows superior performance on both the M-EDESConv and M-TESC datasets, both objectively and subjectively. Finally, our EmoValidBench benchmarks of GPT-4.1 Nano and Llama-3.1 8B indicate that current LLMs generate contextually similar and diverse validating responses, but emotional understanding remains a major area for improvement. Project page: https://github.com/zihaurpang/Multilingual-Emotional-Validation

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17.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.07013

CoBit: Language Modeling with Bitstream Diffusion

Authors:

Georgios Batzolis↗Mark Girolami↗Luca Ambrogioni↗

Diffusion language models (DLMs) promise parallel, order-agnostic generation, but on standard benchmarks they have historically lagged behind autoregressive models in sample quality and diversity. Recent continuous flow and diffusion approaches have narrowed this gap. In this work, we further close the autoregressive gap by modeling text as a continuous diffusion process over fixed-width binary bitstreams. We refer to the resulting model as CoBit (Continuous Bitstream Diffusion). Our approach represents semantic tokens as analog bit sequences and uses a matched-filter residual parameterization to isolate contextual learning from analytic independent-bit posteriors. Crucially, we adopt a stochastic sampler that applies Langevin-type corrections gated by the entropy-rate profile, concentrating stochasticity in high-information regions while remaining nearly deterministic elsewhere. On LM1B, our 130M-parameter model reaches a generative perplexity (GenPPL) of 59.76 at matched real-data entropy (4.31) using 256 neural function evaluations (NFEs), outperforming prior DLM baselines and reaching the autoregressive reference. On OpenWebText (OWT), our sampler establishes a new continuous-DLM Pareto frontier, achieving GenPPL 27.06 at entropy 5.26 using 4x fewer steps than previous 1024-NFE baselines. Scaling the same recipe to a 462M-parameter model (CoBit-M) further improves the OWT GenPPL-entropy frontier over the 130M model (CoBit-S) and over medium-scale continuous and discrete DLM baselines, reaching GenPPL 19.5 at entropy 5.40, near real-data entropy (5.44), and approaching pretrained GPT-2 Medium over the high-quality region. As an additional benefit, bitstream diffusion removes the O(V) vocabulary scaling bottleneck of standard DLMs: by predicting O(log V) bitwise logits via semantic bit-patching, it lowers memory and raises throughput, a scalable paradigm as vocabulary sizes grow.

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18.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:1314a73deb95b83732dbf2271ee99952

Tox21mer, A transformer foundation model for Tox21 high-throughput concentration-response curves data

Authors:

Li↗Hwang↗Shockley↗Motsinger-Reif↗Hsieh↗J.-H↗Auerbach↗S. S↗Reif↗

The U.S. Tox21 collaboration has generated a large reference library of high-throughput concentration-response assays. Here we present Tox21mer, a 43.5-million-parameter transformer that encodes each Tox21 concentration-response curve together with assay metadata into a 768-dimensional representation. Tox21mer was pretrained on ~2.5 million curves from 102 assay protocols and 6,727 compounds using masked-response reconstruction as the primary objective, with low-weight auxiliary supervision on assay outcome and AC50. To evaluate the learned representation, we trained lightweight probes on frozen embeddings from concentration-response curves of held-out compounds. The representation supported a macro-F1 of 0.985 for three-class outcome prediction (agonist, antagonist, inactive), a binary F1 of 0.994 for active/inactive prediction, and an R2 of 0.87 for log10(AC50). The learned embeddings formed coherent groupings by curve-class category. A masked-only pretraining variant retained near-baseline probe performance, indicating that the representation is learned largely from the self-supervised objective rather than from auxiliary labels. Ablation analyses further showed that predictive performance depends mainly on curve-level response-value distributions conditioned on assay context, with limited reliance on detailed within-curve ordering. Tox21mer thus provides a reusable foundation representation for Tox21 concentration-response data that can support extrapolation to untested compounds through integration with chemical features or distillation into chemistry-only student models for large-scale external screening.

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19.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19657

$K$-Theoretic Obstructions to Linearizing QCA Representations

Authors:

Mattie Ji↗Bowen Yang↗

arXiv:2606.19657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Projective representations arise naturally in physics and representation theory, and determining whether they can be linearized has been a fundamental problem. In this work, we study the analogous problem for quantum cellular automata (QCA) representations, which incorporate locality constraints imposed by a metric space $X$. Over an arbitrary field $\mathbb{F}$, we develop an obstruction theory for the linearization of QCA representations, using the algebraic $K$-theory spectrum of QCA constructed in previous work of the authors. The resulting obstructions are governed by the homotopy type of the QCA spaces, from which we extract universal obstruction classes to linearization. In the complex algebraic and unitary case, we also fully compute the homotopy types of the QCA spaces over a point, a line, and a plane.

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20.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19438

Indefinite Quantum Causality

Authors:

Fabio Costa↗Giulia Rubino↗Cyril Branciard↗\v{C}aslav Brukner↗Marco T\'ulio Quintino↗

arXiv:2606.19438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, operational approaches to quantum foundations have been developed as a means of understanding the core principles and distinctive features of quantum theory. Such approaches typically view physical processes as sequences of operations, with earlier operations serving as causes of later effects. However, a growing literature is emerging on the possibility of relaxing this assumption and allowing for quantum indefiniteness in the causal order. This development stems from a variety of motivations, both fundamental and applied, including exploring the role of causality in quantum theory, the interplay between quantum theory and general relativity, and higher-order quantum computing. A prominent offshoot of this development is the emergence of indefinite causal order as a feasible resource for quantum information processing. This review provides an overview of the current state of the art in the field, covering the methodology underlying indefinite quantum causality within the so-called "process matrix formalism", outlining key results and experimental implementations, and discussing recent advances.

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21.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:2e76c8e1562952ec829b18fc544963dd

Looking beyond stereotyped neuron structures reveals links between beading and morphological rearrangements in aging phenotypes.

Authors:

Gomez↗Nguyen↗Lagergren↗Flores↗San Miguel↗

Understanding how neuronal morphology changes during aging and acute stress is essential for elucidating mechanisms of neurodegeneration. The highly branched PVD neuron of Caenorhabditis elegans provides a powerful model for studying dendritic remodeling and degeneration-associated phenotypes such as dendritic beading. However, the complexity of this arbor presents substantial challenges for automated segmentation and quantitative analysis. In this study, we adapted a convolutional neural network (CNN)-guided region growing framework for automated dendrite tracing, coupled with two topology-based algorithms for categorizing dendritic segments by branching degree. The segmentation algorithm achieved high accuracy relative to manual tracing, with a median Dice coefficient of 0.82, while reducing analysis time by approximately tenfold. Automated dendrite categorization demonstrated strong agreement with manual annotations across branching orders, though position-based mapping performance declined with age due to progressive morphological distortion. Leveraging this platform, we investigated mechanistic differences in dendritic beading patterns observed during aging and cold shock. Consistent with prior work, aging was associated with decreased inter-bead spacing, whereas cold shock produced increased bead dispersion with stress severity. Structural analysis revealed that these trends were not driven by dendritic pruning or reduced arbor complexity. Instead, while a traditional anatomically unflexible paradigm falsely implicated lower-degree dendrites as highly vulnerable, our branching-informed framework revealed that age-dependent beading is fundamentally dictated by a segments history of successive branching events. Conversely, acute cold shock triggered systemic beading that expanded across all dendritic orders in a severity-dependent manner. Together, these findings demonstrate that chronic aging and acute stress engage distinct degenerative pathways (compartment-specific lineage vulnerability versus global architectural collapse) rather than gross morphological loss, as well as highlighting the need for paradigms that enable reliable analysis of changing morphologies.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18661

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

Authors:

Chengfu Liu↗Dongyang Hou↗Junwu Xiang↗Cheng Yang↗Xuezhi Cui↗Zeyuan Wang↗Liangtian Liu↗Zelang Miao↗

Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an instruction-driven agentic framework comprising three components. First, LandslideBench, a multimodal fine-grained dataset with seven subtype labels, high-resolution imagery, pixel-level masks, and high-quality textual descriptions, is constructed via multi-VLM cross-validation and interactive annotation. Then, LandslideVLM, a landslide-oriented VLM, is fine-tuned via LoRA on LandslideBench to enhance geological semantic understanding. Finally, LandslideAgent, a domain rule-enhanced agent taking LandslideVLM as its cognitive backbone, employs a dual-rule controller incorporating structured report metadata constraints and cross-validation identification constraints to regulate automated tool invocation. Experiments demonstrate that LandslideBench provides effective baselines across five mainstream models on fine-grained classification and semantic segmentation. LandslideVLM achieves accuracy improvements of 10.96%, 32.87%, and 15.91% on landslide discrimination, fine-grained classification, and semantic description quality, respectively. LandslideAgent further enables autonomous multi-source spatial data inference, realizing full-process intelligence for landslide identification and analysis.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15072

Texture-Shape Bias Balancing for Robust Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation in Automotive NIR Imagery

Authors:

Felix Stillger↗Ben Hamscher↗Lukas Hahn↗Annika M\"utze↗Tobias Meisen↗Kira Maag↗

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of visual perception in modern automotive systems, enabling pixel-level scene understanding. Near-Infrared imaging (NIR) offers stable detection under difficult illumination conditions, but the development of domain-specific semantic segmentation models remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality annotated data from real-world scenarios. Synthetic datasets offer a scalable alternative, but models trained on synthetic images often suffer performance degradation when transferred to real domains. We present the first systematic study on synthetic to real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in NIR images in the automotive domain. We propose a generative augmentation framework that transforms synthetic images into realistic NIR-style variants via our introduced target style adaptation (TSA). TSA fine-tunes a latent diffusion model via low-rank adaptation on a small curated set of real NIR images and applies it to synthetic training data using structure-preserving multi-signal conditioning. To reduce texture bias and improve segmentation robustness, we further apply a Voronoi-based style diversification strategy (VSD) that modifies the original textures while preserving scene geometry. Experiments with multiple model architectures on NIR data from vehicle interiors and street scenes show that balancing inductive bias during training leads to noticeably more robust semantic segmentation and effectively reduces the domain gap in our real-world scenarios by up to 63.6% on exterior and 28.4% on interior data. The code is available at GitHub.

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24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.14738

TAPIOCA: Why Task- Aware Pruning Improves OOD model Capability

Authors:

Krish Sharma↗Omar Naim↗Soumadeep Saha↗Vinija Jain↗Aman Chadha↗Nicholas Asher↗

arXiv:2605.14738v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has promoted task-aware layer pruning as a way to improve model performance on particular tasks, as shown by TALE. In this paper, we investigate when such improvements occur and why. We show first that, across controlled polynomial regression tasks and large language models, such pruning yields no benefit on in-distribution (ID) data but consistently improves out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy. We further show empirically that OOD inputs induce layerwise norm and pairwise-distance profiles that deviate from the corresponding ID profiles. This leads to a geometric explanation of task-aware pruning: each task induces a task-adapted geometry, characterized empirically by the representation profiles observed on ID inputs. OOD inputs can introduce a distorted version of the task-adapted geometry. Task-aware pruning identifies layers that create or amplify this distortion; by removing them, it shifts OOD representational norms and pairwise distances toward those observed on the adapted distribution. This realigns OOD inputs with the model's task-adapted geometry and improves performance. We provide causal evidence through controlled distribution shifts and residual-scaling interventions, and demonstrate consistent behavior across model scales.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.07537

From Architecture to Output: Structural Origins of Hallucination in Large Language Models and the Amplifying Role of Data

Authors:

Md. Rejaul Korim Sadi↗Toufiqur Rahman Tasin↗Golam Mostofa Naeem↗

arXiv:2606.07537v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models hallucinate–producing fluent, confident, factually wrong outputs–with a consistency that persists across generations and scales. Existing taxonomies classify hallucination by output type, distinguishing intrinsic from extrinsic failures and faithfulness from factuality divergence. These frameworks are descriptively rigorous but do not identify which internal mechanism produced a given instance. This paper analyses hallucination as a structural consequence of three architectural decisions that together form a compound failure system. Self-attention's co-occurrence learning substitutes statistical proximity for semantic meaning and produces entity confusion, fact misattribution, and semantic drift. The maximum likelihood estimation training objective optimises next-token probability without factual constraint, rewarding statistically plausible outputs regardless of their truth value. Autoregressive decoding's permanent left-to-right commitment under exposure bias ensures that a single wrong token cascades forward through the entire output sequence without revision. Dataset pathologies–long-tail deficiencies, training bias, and synthetic pollution–amplify these vulnerabilities but do not independently cause them. We make three contributions. First, we map each mechanism to a specific output category in the Alansari and Luqman taxonomy, locating intrinsic hallucination in self-attention, extrinsic hallucination in MLE, and logical inconsistency in autoregressive decoding. Second, we show that each commonly cited dataset pathology exploits one of these mechanisms rather than originating hallucination independently. Third, we identify the diagnostic limitation of output-type-only classification and contrast it with inference-layer mitigation approaches.

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